What do you think of dual actuator hard drives? I never knew these even existed…

Here’s a quick summary of the vid for those who want a TL;DW:

  • Dual actuator drives are a single drive with two actuator arms inside
  • These arms have their own platters, each with access to half of the drive’s capacity
  • The SAS version shows up as two separate drives: one for each actuator
  • The SATA version shows up as a single drive, however can be partitioned at a specific LBA near the middle to use both actuators independently
  • Linux kernel updated to support these drives better when queuing commands
  • Capable of saturating a 5gbit SATA link

Personally, my concern is RAID setups, particularly in a SAS config. Will filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS know that two storage devices are the same physical drive… aside from that, and concern about more mechanical parts, this looks exciting especially for sequential speed throughput!

EDIT: fix typos

  • ShortN0te
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    8 months ago

    The amazing thing about those are that they are halfing the rebuild time. With large drives you get rebuild time of over 24 hours which is actually frightening.

    Setup is a one time thing and yes you need to be carefull about it but i bet software support will come as soon as those get more mainstream.