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
HGST is a part of WD and has been for quite a while.
But a big part of why the average consumer drive kind of sucks is that there is way more money in enterprise level drives so very little resources get put toward client drives.
Owned by, yes. Have their operations actually been integrated though? I haven’t checked in a long time, but it was still a separate division last time I did.
It’s integrated. Only a few things internally are still labeled HGST.