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
Never ever going to buy Seagate again after the crap they’ve pulled on their Exos drives.
They simply decided to completely trash SMART and spin down commands. The drives simply won’t give you useful SMART data nor they won’t ever actually spin down, you can’t force it, the drive will report is as if it was spun down but in reality its still spinning.