It would be nice to have a complete breakdown of the Hard drive in terms of sectors size. There is a lot of confusion going around as to what drives are 4k vs 512e vs native 512byte. I just built a ZFS box with mirrored Hitachi 3tb 7200rpm drives (HDS72303), and I still don't know whether they are using 512byte sectors or 512e.
physical, yes, but I'm more interested in the sector size reported by the firmware. I've got these WD drives that refuse to be honest and cause problems.
While some older 1TB and so forth did use 512k, at this point virtually anything new is 4k (although sadly probably not native), and anything over a TB for sure. You should use
ashift=12
as a creation option when you create your zpool in order to make sure ZFS knows about the real sector size and can optimize accordingly. You should consider doing this with a new pool *anyway* even if for some reason you were still using 512k, because the performance impact is minimal, but while 512k disks can be added to an ashift=12 zpool, native 4k disks can *not* be added to an ashift=9 pool. So in the near future when we hopefully start seeing native 4k disk available a 4k pool setup will have forward compatibility, whereas you'd have to destroy and recreate a pool to upgrade even a single disk otherwise. That might not matter if it's something tiny (a single mirror) but it'll be a bigger deal if you make something larger that you'd really rather be able to upgrade a disk at a time (or replace a bad disk without worry).
Closer than you know. 2 Full platters. Only Half of one of them is being used. They've been doing that for years. It's like an artificially lowered clock count on a CPU, the power is there, you just can't use it. You pay for a full two platter drive they just turn off half of one platter with software so you only see 1.5 TB instead of the 2 TB physically there.
They're not using HALF a platter... They're using all of one side of a platter, IE, a two-platter drive would have 3 heads rather than the expected 4. Saves a little on hardware, and in the HDD business today, every penny is worth clinging on to.
Not that this is anything new or anything, this practice stretches back to the 1980s at least.
I often wondered if it there was a harvesting process so that platters with flaws could use some smaller percentage of the platter?
Sort of like a nasty scratch on a DVD-R or CD-R -- if it doesn't touch the part containing the data near the disc's centre, your data is still good.
Does it work this way? If both platters truly are A-OK, could you "unlock" a 750GB drive into 1TB? I suppose not or someone would have surely done this before now...
The sequential read doesn't look very smooth. Is this a problem with the timing method, request pattern, test system, OS driver, disk cache, disk firmware or SATA implementation ???
Are the tracks so small and wobbly that it has too wait to re-align, re-read data or read another location due to lower data/signal quality ?
Good old mechanical Hard drives are still stepping up, even in this SSD day and age... Let me tell you what I would give for a 1TB Crucial M4 for under 200 bucks right about now:)
The current Barracuda XT drives I own (8) have had a terrible trackrecord with my Adaptec 2840 raidcontroller. Despite FW-updates and whatnot.
I'd love to get rid of my 8 1TB Samsung F4s and replace them with 8 2TB drives from this line. However I'm slightly worried Seagate and Adaptec simply don't play nice.
Are non-enterprise drives even certified on those controllers?
WD RE4 and the like always work with hardware RAID controllers. They cost a bit more of course, but you were willing to shell out for an 8-port RAID controller, right...?
It seems to me that if they're moving exclusively to 2TB drives, they're ceding the low cost market to Samsung and Western Digital. Their 5K RPM drives have been a big hit in the home server space as the high capacities for the price were well worth the lower performance. Unless Seagate has a trick up their sleeves, they won't be able to price their drives competitively with that market segment.
Samsung HDD unit was bought out by Seagate in April, also Seagate and Samsung agreed to cross license technologies and that Seagate will get its nand from Samsung for its hybrid drives..
Well, as for hybrid drives, what is interesting is 2.5'' drives, for laptops, not drive for desktops where you usually have space for multiple drives anyway...
Er... Hybrid drives are a great replacement for a regular mass storage drives if you have any performance sensitive applications on them at all (like games you can't fit on the SSD, etc.). Also, a lot of people are still put off by SSDs because of $/GB and/or the hassle of managing programs/ data between two drives.
Granted, HDD prices are going to need to come back down for a hybrid drive to be price competitive.
I'm definitely looking at picking one up to use as my secondary drive when they come out.
Seagate always was making loud vibrating (and even faulty) HDDs, i guess this means they focus on their shortcomings now.
Apart from the more than doubled prices per GB the new lineup seems completely uninteresting, seeing the 2TB variant being yet another noisy 3 platter design. And look at that HDTach sheet, 55 mb minimum!! even my 8 year old hdds do better than that! 130mb average is not quite the ballpark i was looking for. 1,5TB was silent and cheap from Samsung almost 5 years ago.
I do hope the mergers fall through, Samsung and Hitachi are needed for a healthy HDD market. This is a huge letdown, considering we finally got to 1TB per platter, artificially castrating the product lineup for margins just stinks.
Why are manufacture not putting out 4 TB drive? I am guessing Is because they are saving it for latter since both Patterned Media and Heat Assisted Tech arent mature yet and we are at least another 2 - 3 years away from them?
With current tech PMR we have reach the limit of it, or we could properly squeeze out 10 - 20% per platter with some technology on the Head rather then platter. But PMR has reach its life.
And it is a funny move since HDD price is raising fast they dont even need to do any new products to drive sales.
When are we going to see a review and comparison of some real caching solutions like intel SRT, Dataplex cache, and compare it to Seagate Hybrids (momentus 1 and momentus 2?)...
I pretty much have to buy an OCZ Synapse if I want a decent caching solution today.
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36 Comments
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LeftSide - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
It would be nice to have a complete breakdown of the Hard drive in terms of sectors size. There is a lot of confusion going around as to what drives are 4k vs 512e vs native 512byte. I just built a ZFS box with mirrored Hitachi 3tb 7200rpm drives (HDS72303), and I still don't know whether they are using 512byte sectors or 512e.DigitalFreak - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
It's in the chart. All the 750GB and larger drives are 4k sectors.icrf - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
physical, yes, but I'm more interested in the sector size reported by the firmware. I've got these WD drives that refuse to be honest and cause problems.LeftSide - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Exactly.zanon - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
While some older 1TB and so forth did use 512k, at this point virtually anything new is 4k (although sadly probably not native), and anything over a TB for sure. You should useashift=12
as a creation option when you create your zpool in order to make sure ZFS knows about the real sector size and can optimize accordingly. You should consider doing this with a new pool *anyway* even if for some reason you were still using 512k, because the performance impact is minimal, but while 512k disks can be added to an ashift=12 zpool, native 4k disks can *not* be added to an ashift=9 pool. So in the near future when we hopefully start seeing native 4k disk available a 4k pool setup will have forward compatibility, whereas you'd have to destroy and recreate a pool to upgrade even a single disk otherwise. That might not matter if it's something tiny (a single mirror) but it'll be a bigger deal if you make something larger that you'd really rather be able to upgrade a disk at a time (or replace a bad disk without worry).
Gnarr - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
So they only utilize 750GB of two platters? or how does that sum up?InterClaw - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Maybe it has one and a half platters inside. :)rahvin - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Closer than you know. 2 Full platters. Only Half of one of them is being used. They've been doing that for years. It's like an artificially lowered clock count on a CPU, the power is there, you just can't use it. You pay for a full two platter drive they just turn off half of one platter with software so you only see 1.5 TB instead of the 2 TB physically there.FaaR - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
They're not using HALF a platter... They're using all of one side of a platter, IE, a two-platter drive would have 3 heads rather than the expected 4. Saves a little on hardware, and in the HDD business today, every penny is worth clinging on to.Not that this is anything new or anything, this practice stretches back to the 1980s at least.
semo - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
They've probably short-stroked them.Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
I often wondered if it there was a harvesting process so that platters with flaws could use some smaller percentage of the platter?Sort of like a nasty scratch on a DVD-R or CD-R -- if it doesn't touch the part containing the data near the disc's centre, your data is still good.
Does it work this way? If both platters truly are A-OK, could you "unlock" a 750GB drive into 1TB? I suppose not or someone would have surely done this before now...
tygrus - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
The sequential read doesn't look very smooth. Is this a problem with the timing method, request pattern, test system, OS driver, disk cache, disk firmware or SATA implementation ???Are the tracks so small and wobbly that it has too wait to re-align, re-read data or read another location due to lower data/signal quality ?
xcomvic - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Good old mechanical Hard drives are still stepping up, even in this SSD day and age... Let me tell you what I would give for a 1TB Crucial M4 for under 200 bucks right about now:)Exodite - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
To be fair though, right now SSDs look straight up economical compared to the HDD prices... :(rlandess - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
"Let me tell you what I would give for a 1TB Crucial M4 for under 200 bucks right about now:) "I'm guessing under $200.
RU482 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Oooo Oooo....I know!!!Under 200 bucks
/what do I win?
vectorm12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
The current Barracuda XT drives I own (8) have had a terrible trackrecord with my Adaptec 2840 raidcontroller. Despite FW-updates and whatnot.I'd love to get rid of my 8 1TB Samsung F4s and replace them with 8 2TB drives from this line.
However I'm slightly worried Seagate and Adaptec simply don't play nice.
Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Are non-enterprise drives even certified on those controllers?WD RE4 and the like always work with hardware RAID controllers. They cost a bit more of course, but you were willing to shell out for an 8-port RAID controller, right...?
mtverlander - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
I was hoping for a 2-platter 2TB drive, but it looks like these guys use 3 less-dense platters. EXPLAIN!Golgatha - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Actually I was wondering the same thing. A 2 platter 2TB drive would be fast and cool running.Taft12 - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Production of sub-1TB platters isn't being shut off like a faucet. Those platters gotta go somewhere!ViRGE - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
It seems to me that if they're moving exclusively to 2TB drives, they're ceding the low cost market to Samsung and Western Digital. Their 5K RPM drives have been a big hit in the home server space as the high capacities for the price were well worth the lower performance. Unless Seagate has a trick up their sleeves, they won't be able to price their drives competitively with that market segment.Roland00Address - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Samsung HDD unit was bought out by Seagate in April, also Seagate and Samsung agreed to cross license technologies and that Seagate will get its nand from Samsung for its hybrid drives..Guspaz - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
We have five platter drives. We have 1TB per platter densities. Why don't we have 5TB drives?James5mith - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
We have 4TB drives. Why aren't you buying them?aranyagag - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Kindly do name the manufacturer & the model number of a publicly available 4 TB bare drive.Golgatha - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Ext...Nihility - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
failQapa - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Because SSDs is what matter ;)HDDs... well, I just need some for "slow storage", so I don't really care that much anymore.
So, Anand any news on, when do you post a review of the OCZ Octane?
(They were supposed to be out today...)
kyuu - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Yes please!Qapa - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - link
Well, as for hybrid drives, what is interesting is 2.5'' drives, for laptops, not drive for desktops where you usually have space for multiple drives anyway...kyuu - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Er... Hybrid drives are a great replacement for a regular mass storage drives if you have any performance sensitive applications on them at all (like games you can't fit on the SSD, etc.). Also, a lot of people are still put off by SSDs because of $/GB and/or the hassle of managing programs/ data between two drives.Granted, HDD prices are going to need to come back down for a hybrid drive to be price competitive.
I'm definitely looking at picking one up to use as my secondary drive when they come out.
axp - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Seagate always was making loud vibrating (and even faulty) HDDs, i guess this means they focus on their shortcomings now.Apart from the more than doubled prices per GB the new lineup seems completely uninteresting, seeing the 2TB variant being yet another noisy 3 platter design.
And look at that HDTach sheet, 55 mb minimum!! even my 8 year old hdds do better than that!
130mb average is not quite the ballpark i was looking for.
1,5TB was silent and cheap from Samsung almost 5 years ago.
I do hope the mergers fall through, Samsung and Hitachi are needed for a healthy HDD market.
This is a huge letdown, considering we finally got to 1TB per platter, artificially castrating the product lineup for margins just stinks.
iwod - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
Why are manufacture not putting out 4 TB drive? I am guessing Is because they are saving it for latter since both Patterned Media and Heat Assisted Tech arent mature yet and we are at least another 2 - 3 years away from them?With current tech PMR we have reach the limit of it, or we could properly squeeze out 10 - 20% per platter with some technology on the Head rather then platter. But PMR has reach its life.
And it is a funny move since HDD price is raising fast they dont even need to do any new products to drive sales.
jdietz - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 - link
3TB - $0.0602TB - $0.053
1.5TB - $0.560
1TB - $0.072
mailman65er - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 - link
When are we going to see a review and comparison of some real caching solutions like intel SRT, Dataplex cache, and compare it to Seagate Hybrids (momentus 1 and momentus 2?)...I pretty much have to buy an OCZ Synapse if I want a decent caching solution today.