What's the status of this drive's APM setting? Do the heads park frequently and make a lot of clicking noises? Can you enable/disable it using the driver or something like HDParm? Lately I've been less trusting of Seagate's HDDs because they don't allow user-controlled APM settings on many of their models. I have sufficient cooling in my rack, but half the drives I have are firmware locked with aggressive APM.
After reading the review, I'd probably go for the Hitachi HE6 if these drives were priced close together. The feature set and more advanced nature of the Hitachi make it more attractive. I get that whole "not tried and true" helium technology argument, but the warranty is the same.
I've read somewhere that the HGST Deskstars 6TB will be released soon. If they live by their predecessors, it's probably a more reliable substitute for the WD Red without the cost of the Seagate drives.
Oh yea, after seeing the prices $420 for the seagate nas is only $30 cheaper and you'll make the 30 dollars back in power savings over the life of the drive. And the enterprise seagate is $50 more! They also consistently fail to mention that the He6 has less turbulence and friction from the platters spinning in a less dense environment. Less turbulence = less vibration and less vibration = less acoustic output. Also because of the helium environment the motor that spins the drive is slightly less powerful than standard motors since it uses less energy to spin platters inside helium versus air. Less powerful motor also means less vibrations from the motor. It's the quietest 7200 rpm 6TB HDD without a doubt.
Yeah like I've said before in 20+ years of using a PC I still do not have 1 dead hitachi drive in my possession. I've probably bought 8 or so hitachi drives in my life and they are flawless. I've had 5 Seagates break and 3 were from the same rma process like the drive that replaced the broken one broke then broke again thats how bad they are. Western Digital isn't that bad I've only had 1 of those ever break on me. Haven't had much experience with Toshiba tho.
Yeah so forgot, I totally recommend the He6. I have a hard time believing the listed acoustics for the 2 drives. Seagate says their drive is 27db and the He6 is 29db. I rly highly doubt the seagate is quieter the Helium environment produces less friction and less turbulence because helium is less dense than air. Friction and turbulence causes vibration and is a huge source of HDD noise. The He6 should be the quietest 6TB 7200 rpm drive. Also tho the He6 lacks maximum transfer speed it makes up for it with the lowest latency by a good 2-3 milliseconds. So the He6 ends up feeling more snappy even tho its lower max transfer speed.
What you will see there is exactly my same experience. Hitachi has barely any failures, Seagate has a huge amount of failures way beyond every 1 else and western digital is a little worse than hitachi but better than seagate.
And another thing. You can almost guarantee Hitachi has at the very least an 8TB He8 to compete against Seagates new 8TB drive waiting in the wings going through its last QA testing. If Hitachi can blend the extra platter density from helium and the extra density per platter in shingled recording being used in Seagate then they could easily blow past 8TB and make 10TB and 12TB drives as well. The helium Hitachi drive is without a doubt the most advanced hard drive platform on the market.
And for massive deployments like a cloud storage service would need, the energy savings from the He6 can end up saving a lot of kWh on your power bill. But even for a home user it's nice to shave off as many watts as possible from your system without affecting performance, thats why 80+ platinum sells even tho it's only microscopically better than 80+ gold.
Hitachi has the lowest failure rate in a massively huge deployment of HDD's in a cloud storage facility. Gives you a pretty good idea just how amazing they are.
That raw read/write speed is typical for 1TB platters on a 7200rpm drive. My guess is that speed is the comfort zone for these drives, and they probably spin down to 5400 when idling to reduce power consumption
No matter what WD likes to tell you with "IntelliPower" etc. drives do not normally run at different speeds. The mechanics, head aerodynamics / fly height and everything must be tailored to a specific spindle speed. Changing it on the fly has so far been unfeasible and wouldn't be much quicker than simply spinning down at idle, yet provide a only a small fraction of the power savings.
IntelliPower and WD don't say that the drive changes speed during operation. An IntelliPower drive is a fixed speed, but set to meet certain power requirements. Because of this not all IntelliPower drives are at the same spindle speed. http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/36...
When 'IntelliPower' was first introduced WD were very secretive about exactly what it meant. Although there are now sources, their vague comments on exactly what IntelliPower is lead people to the conclusion that the drives were adjusting speed depending on demand.
I believe the clever guys at SPCR were the first to determine the speed of IntelliPower drives by looking at the drives harmonics.
I can see that happening. I just never thought of IntelliPower as being such a thing. HDD's cannot vary their spindle speed during data access. A fixed spindle speed during operation is monitored by the drive, and if it changes, it is considered a major error. You'd actually hear the WD drive Click twice, and then read Track 0 in an attempt to re-calibrate it's position.
This would be really easy to verify with a oscilloscope, just watch the waveforms going into the stepper motor... (But yeah, intellipower drives run at fixed speeds, although different models can run at different speeds than other models)
Ganesh, I'll admit I didn't read between the lines, but why exclude the WD Red Pros from the analysis? Seems a bit out of place to compare an enterprise class HD to a non-enterprise class HD (WD Reds @ 5400 RPM, with 3 year warranty, lower MTBF)?
Ganesh, in your conclusion you simply attribute the performance advantage of the Seagates to their larger cache. While the cache does help, it normally doesn't help a lot once you have enough of it. Otherwise we would see much larger caches already, as DRAM in the sub-GB range is really cheap, whereas we're talking about 500$ enterprise HDDs here.
I suspect the larger platter density of the Seagates has more to do with their performance than the cache. Firmware also plays a major in real world HDD peformance.
We observed similar performance advantages for the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 vs. the WD Red Pro at the 4 TB capacity point.
Both of them use the same number of platters, have the same rotational speed. The only difference was the cache size.
That said, things are indeed different in this case - the WD Red has lower rotational speed, but does have higher platter density (1.2TB/platter) at the 6TB point. So, I should probably have not stressed the cache size differences too much (just had a hangover from the 4TB review)
The 4 TB Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 also uses 1 TB platters, whereas the Red Pro uses 800 GB platters. Compare the sequential write speeds in MB/s (max - average - min):
The seagate did have like 20-30MB/sec faster sequential transfers but the He6 has 2-3 milliseconds faster latency on the access times. Personally I'd rather have the 2-3 milliseconds lower in access time over 20-30MB/sec higher sequential transfers. Not too mention the lower power use, less heat, less noise and hitachis unrivaled reliability. If you are building a dense NAS setup the lower heat per drive really helps out. I feel like you would notice the lower latency more than like 160MB/sec vs 130MB/sec
"The cache size differential between the competing drives has little to do with the sequential results."
I know. That's exactly why I replied this to Ganesh's
"... Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 vs. the WD Red Pro at the 4 TB capacity point. Both of them use the same number of platters, have the same rotational speed. The only difference was the cache size."
All of the performance test charts shown MB/sec generally in the hundreds. However, the "Real Life 60% Random 65% Reads" test shows only single digits in MB/s. Is this a chart labeling problem? If not, why isn't there any explanation about the huge difference?
HDDs are very fast for sequential reads/writes because as soon as it finishes reading/writing one sector, the next is underneath the read heads. They're horribly slow for random IO because most of the time is spent moving the read/write heads into place not doing data reads. This has been the case with every HDD for decades. (Possibly all the way to the beginning; but I'm not familiar with very old designs limitations.) The main advantage of SDDs is that because they don't have to move drive heads around they can be many times faster in random IO than a magnetic HDD. (They're still faster in sequential IO; read the intro to SSD articles on this site from a few years ago for details about their architecture.)
I agree with you, but that is a serious drop-off. Shouldn't an intelligent NAS be able to have different drives look for different parts of those reads with some type of large LUT?
For small files the typical transfer rates of HDDs are in the low single-digit range. Even if you have 4 of them and performance scales perfectly, that's still very slow. That's why a good SSD on SATA 2 get still be 10 to 100 times faster than an HDD, depending on the actual usage case, even though their maximum transfer rates are comparable.
Honestly, most serious enterprises do not use SATA HDD drives for production servers. The queue depth is only 32 vs 256 for SAS drives. SATA drives are fine for backups, the just can't provide the IOPS an Enterprise server running multiple VM's or DB's. Will still need to demand SAS for better IOPS in the HDD storage arena. VSphere VSAN will choke on SATA based disk system if a hosts dies.
Most cloud providers are very slow if you use their storage solutions based on HDD. I am referring to in-house shops that run Dell/HP with Vsphere or Oracle DB's. Anything needing a lot of storage and decent I/O. The price difference to make a drive with SAS interface and SATA is very minimal, but the performance difference can be big when under a lot of simultaneous requests.
Exactly. That's why real Enterprise Storage manufacturers, like HGST, provide a host of flash storage, including HH-HL, high capacity, PCI-E storage or low capacity flash caching for large HDD farms.
WD Red drivers seems to have some serious performance bottleneck, even taking into account the slow (5400 RPM) spindle speed.
They seem to suffer from an underpowered controller and simplified firmware, as it seem to be unable to coalesce multiple 512B writes in one 4K sector. For example, see how bad the WD Red fares in HD Tach 512B random write test:
WD RED: 25.475 ms Ent NAS: 6.646 ms
While the enterprise NAS has a larger cache (128 MB vs 64 MB), it is difficult that the cache alone can account for such a large performance improvement in a random write scenario.
On the other side, the random read test is in-line with the different spindle speed (~18.5 ms vs ~14.5 ms)
Intel announced the Intel IoT Platform, a reference model end-to-end designed to unify ans simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things. http://bit.ly/1yCMSnB
Are any of these suitable for DVR-type applications? I'd like to get a bigger drive for my WMC setup. I've been using the WD AV-GP series since they are geared towards non-stop I/O in DVR-type usage.
Not at all. Raid helps distribute the data across drives and get some speedup at most linear to the number of drives, but random access is still random access, and is still slow.
What romrunning "invented" is a software stack that remaps sectors to make random logical access be physically sequential. I believe some company, maybe Fusion IO, did have something like this, though now that I look for it I can not find anything that is not Flash-based.
The idea can definitely work pretty well for speeding up random writes, but for reads it needs some quite good analysis and statistics about what the commonly read sequences are and does not seem too feasible. Maybe that's why they dropped it and use flash caches.
And why this did not appear as a reply to the post i clicked 'reply' on (in a new tab)? Anandtech... get some web devs with a brain... it is not rocket science.
Modern copy-on-write filesystems as ZFS and BTRFS (and, to a limited extent, even classical filesystems as EXT4 and XFS) do exactly that. They transform random writes in sequential one, using the available space similar to a circular log buffer.
For write-intensive, read-insensitive workload they are a great choice, but for some common scenario (eg: databases) they performs quite poorly. Moreover, the resulting files are often very, very much fragmented, leading to very log read performance (when used on top of spinning disks).
This review has some misses w.r.t Enterprise segment. Hardware architecture isn't great. Most importantly this implementation isn't suitable to employers with hundreds of employees accessing data from multiple nations. Lastly, based on my five years of experience in deploying NAS solutions in my businesses I observed Seagate drives fail more than their Hitachi counterparts.
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nathanddrews - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
What's the status of this drive's APM setting? Do the heads park frequently and make a lot of clicking noises? Can you enable/disable it using the driver or something like HDParm? Lately I've been less trusting of Seagate's HDDs because they don't allow user-controlled APM settings on many of their models. I have sufficient cooling in my rack, but half the drives I have are firmware locked with aggressive APM.Samus - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
After reading the review, I'd probably go for the Hitachi HE6 if these drives were priced close together. The feature set and more advanced nature of the Hitachi make it more attractive. I get that whole "not tried and true" helium technology argument, but the warranty is the same.cm2187 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I've read somewhere that the HGST Deskstars 6TB will be released soon. If they live by their predecessors, it's probably a more reliable substitute for the WD Red without the cost of the Seagate drives.Samus - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I agree. Hitachi drives are excellent. If price isn't a factor (they're all the same price) then it's a no brainer.Laststop311 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Oh yea, after seeing the prices $420 for the seagate nas is only $30 cheaper and you'll make the 30 dollars back in power savings over the life of the drive. And the enterprise seagate is $50 more! They also consistently fail to mention that the He6 has less turbulence and friction from the platters spinning in a less dense environment. Less turbulence = less vibration and less vibration = less acoustic output. Also because of the helium environment the motor that spins the drive is slightly less powerful than standard motors since it uses less energy to spin platters inside helium versus air. Less powerful motor also means less vibrations from the motor. It's the quietest 7200 rpm 6TB HDD without a doubt.Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Yeah like I've said before in 20+ years of using a PC I still do not have 1 dead hitachi drive in my possession. I've probably bought 8 or so hitachi drives in my life and they are flawless. I've had 5 Seagates break and 3 were from the same rma process like the drive that replaced the broken one broke then broke again thats how bad they are. Western Digital isn't that bad I've only had 1 of those ever break on me. Haven't had much experience with Toshiba tho.Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Yeah so forgot, I totally recommend the He6. I have a hard time believing the listed acoustics for the 2 drives. Seagate says their drive is 27db and the He6 is 29db. I rly highly doubt the seagate is quieter the Helium environment produces less friction and less turbulence because helium is less dense than air. Friction and turbulence causes vibration and is a huge source of HDD noise. The He6 should be the quietest 6TB 7200 rpm drive. Also tho the He6 lacks maximum transfer speed it makes up for it with the lowest latency by a good 2-3 milliseconds. So the He6 ends up feeling more snappy even tho its lower max transfer speed.Laststop311 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Just some data to backup my claim backblaze is a cloud storage company that tracks it's hard drive failures.https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...
What you will see there is exactly my same experience. Hitachi has barely any failures, Seagate has a huge amount of failures way beyond every 1 else and western digital is a little worse than hitachi but better than seagate.
Laststop311 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
And another thing. You can almost guarantee Hitachi has at the very least an 8TB He8 to compete against Seagates new 8TB drive waiting in the wings going through its last QA testing. If Hitachi can blend the extra platter density from helium and the extra density per platter in shingled recording being used in Seagate then they could easily blow past 8TB and make 10TB and 12TB drives as well. The helium Hitachi drive is without a doubt the most advanced hard drive platform on the market.And for massive deployments like a cloud storage service would need, the energy savings from the He6 can end up saving a lot of kWh on your power bill. But even for a home user it's nice to shave off as many watts as possible from your system without affecting performance, thats why 80+ platinum sells even tho it's only microscopically better than 80+ gold.
ddriver - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Too bad you cannot put in a review the one thing that truly matters - reliability...cm2187 - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
+1MikeMurphy - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Exactly.tocker - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
We could place bets. I'm going for a 40% failure rate inside of 3 years.Thats probably being generous.
Laststop311 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...Hitachi has the lowest failure rate in a massively huge deployment of HDD's in a cloud storage facility. Gives you a pretty good idea just how amazing they are.
ddriver - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
Yeah, but that's not a given, remember back in the days where those same deskstar disks were called deathstar cuz they were dropping down life flies?It would be nice of more cloud storage provides post their stats so that regular people know what to buy.
Zap - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
What RPM are these drives? I know manufacturers like to obfuscate this information, but as a consumer I'd like to know.wavetrex - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
That raw read/write speed is typical for 1TB platters on a 7200rpm drive.My guess is that speed is the comfort zone for these drives, and they probably spin down to 5400 when idling to reduce power consumption
MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
No matter what WD likes to tell you with "IntelliPower" etc. drives do not normally run at different speeds. The mechanics, head aerodynamics / fly height and everything must be tailored to a specific spindle speed. Changing it on the fly has so far been unfeasible and wouldn't be much quicker than simply spinning down at idle, yet provide a only a small fraction of the power savings.hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
IntelliPower and WD don't say that the drive changes speed during operation. An IntelliPower drive is a fixed speed, but set to meet certain power requirements. Because of this not all IntelliPower drives are at the same spindle speed.http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/36...
Navvie - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
When 'IntelliPower' was first introduced WD were very secretive about exactly what it meant. Although there are now sources, their vague comments on exactly what IntelliPower is lead people to the conclusion that the drives were adjusting speed depending on demand.I believe the clever guys at SPCR were the first to determine the speed of IntelliPower drives by looking at the drives harmonics.
hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I can see that happening. I just never thought of IntelliPower as being such a thing. HDD's cannot vary their spindle speed during data access. A fixed spindle speed during operation is monitored by the drive, and if it changes, it is considered a major error. You'd actually hear the WD drive Click twice, and then read Track 0 in an attempt to re-calibrate it's position.extide - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
This would be really easy to verify with a oscilloscope, just watch the waveforms going into the stepper motor... (But yeah, intellipower drives run at fixed speeds, although different models can run at different speeds than other models)MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Thanks.. that sounds better than their 1st explanations. Although I'd still prefer if they said straight "it's 5.4k rpm, give or take a few".hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Marketing.... *sigh*hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Seagate lists this drive as 7200 rpm, which matches its direct competitor, the WD Red Pro.Oyster - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Ganesh, I'll admit I didn't read between the lines, but why exclude the WD Red Pros from the analysis? Seems a bit out of place to compare an enterprise class HD to a non-enterprise class HD (WD Reds @ 5400 RPM, with 3 year warranty, lower MTBF)?MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Because there is no 6 TB Red Pro. Using 800 GB platters it already needs 5 of them to reach 4 TB and can not even reach 5 TB yet.MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Ganesh, in your conclusion you simply attribute the performance advantage of the Seagates to their larger cache. While the cache does help, it normally doesn't help a lot once you have enough of it. Otherwise we would see much larger caches already, as DRAM in the sub-GB range is really cheap, whereas we're talking about 500$ enterprise HDDs here.I suspect the larger platter density of the Seagates has more to do with their performance than the cache. Firmware also plays a major in real world HDD peformance.
ganeshts - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
We observed similar performance advantages for the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 vs. the WD Red Pro at the 4 TB capacity point.Both of them use the same number of platters, have the same rotational speed. The only difference was the cache size.
That said, things are indeed different in this case - the WD Red has lower rotational speed, but does have higher platter density (1.2TB/platter) at the 6TB point. So, I should probably have not stressed the cache size differences too much (just had a hangover from the 4TB review)
MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
The 4 TB Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 also uses 1 TB platters, whereas the Red Pro uses 800 GB platters. Compare the sequential write speeds in MB/s (max - average - min):Red Pro 4 TB: 179 - 142 - 86
Ent. Cap. v4 4 TB: 210 - 166 - 97
Ent. Cap. v4 6 TB: 224 - 171 - 104
The Seagates perform almost identical, with a minor advantage for the 6 TB model. However, the Red Pro is significantly slower.
Communism - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
Seagate 1TB per platter drives have been the fastest (per RPM) ever since their introduction.Compare to WD Blacks with 1TB per platter or HGST 1TB per platter drives and in every single sequential benchmark they have been faster.
The cache size differential between the competing drives has little to do with the sequential results.
Laststop311 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
The seagate did have like 20-30MB/sec faster sequential transfers but the He6 has 2-3 milliseconds faster latency on the access times. Personally I'd rather have the 2-3 milliseconds lower in access time over 20-30MB/sec higher sequential transfers. Not too mention the lower power use, less heat, less noise and hitachis unrivaled reliability. If you are building a dense NAS setup the lower heat per drive really helps out. I feel like you would notice the lower latency more than like 160MB/sec vs 130MB/secMrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
"The cache size differential between the competing drives has little to do with the sequential results."I know. That's exactly why I replied this to Ganesh's
"... Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 vs. the WD Red Pro at the 4 TB capacity point. Both of them use the same number of platters, have the same rotational speed. The only difference was the cache size."
romrunning - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
All of the performance test charts shown MB/sec generally in the hundreds. However, the "Real Life 60% Random 65% Reads" test shows only single digits in MB/s. Is this a chart labeling problem? If not, why isn't there any explanation about the huge difference?DanNeely - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
HDDs are very fast for sequential reads/writes because as soon as it finishes reading/writing one sector, the next is underneath the read heads. They're horribly slow for random IO because most of the time is spent moving the read/write heads into place not doing data reads. This has been the case with every HDD for decades. (Possibly all the way to the beginning; but I'm not familiar with very old designs limitations.) The main advantage of SDDs is that because they don't have to move drive heads around they can be many times faster in random IO than a magnetic HDD. (They're still faster in sequential IO; read the intro to SSD articles on this site from a few years ago for details about their architecture.)romrunning - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
I agree with you, but that is a serious drop-off. Shouldn't an intelligent NAS be able to have different drives look for different parts of those reads with some type of large LUT?MrSpadge - Wednesday, December 10, 2014 - link
You've just invented Raid 0 / 5 / whatever :)For small files the typical transfer rates of HDDs are in the low single-digit range. Even if you have 4 of them and performance scales perfectly, that's still very slow. That's why a good SSD on SATA 2 get still be 10 to 100 times faster than an HDD, depending on the actual usage case, even though their maximum transfer rates are comparable.
romrunning - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
That's what I was thinking - the test was performed on a 3-drive RAID-5 array in the QNAP, right? So why isn't it's RAID controller more intelligent?Supercell99 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Honestly, most serious enterprises do not use SATA HDD drives for production servers. The queue depth is only 32 vs 256 for SAS drives. SATA drives are fine for backups, the just can't provide the IOPS an Enterprise server running multiple VM's or DB's. Will still need to demand SAS for better IOPS in the HDD storage arena. VSphere VSAN will choke on SATA based disk system if a hosts dies.cm2187 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Most clouds use SATA drives.Supercell99 - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Most cloud providers are very slow if you use their storage solutions based on HDD. I am referring to in-house shops that run Dell/HP with Vsphere or Oracle DB's. Anything needing a lot of storage and decent I/O. The price difference to make a drive with SAS interface and SATA is very minimal, but the performance difference can be big when under a lot of simultaneous requests.MrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Sure, SAS enterprise HDDs are faster.. but at QD > 32 any HDD is just crawling. For such high loads you really want your hot data to be on flash.hlmcompany - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Exactly. That's why real Enterprise Storage manufacturers, like HGST, provide a host of flash storage, including HH-HL, high capacity, PCI-E storage or low capacity flash caching for large HDD farms.shodanshok - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
WD Red drivers seems to have some serious performance bottleneck, even taking into account the slow (5400 RPM) spindle speed.They seem to suffer from an underpowered controller and simplified firmware, as it seem to be unable to coalesce multiple 512B writes in one 4K sector. For example, see how bad the WD Red fares in HD Tach 512B random write test:
WD RED: 25.475 ms
Ent NAS: 6.646 ms
While the enterprise NAS has a larger cache (128 MB vs 64 MB), it is difficult that the cache alone can account for such a large performance improvement in a random write scenario.
On the other side, the random read test is in-line with the different spindle speed (~18.5 ms vs ~14.5 ms)
@ganesh: any possibility to ping WD about that?
theKai007 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Intel announced the Intel IoT Platform, a reference model end-to-end designed to unify ans simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things. http://bit.ly/1yCMSnBBPB - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Are any of these suitable for DVR-type applications? I'd like to get a bigger drive for my WMC setup. I've been using the WD AV-GP series since they are geared towards non-stop I/O in DVR-type usage.Visual - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Not at all. Raid helps distribute the data across drives and get some speedup at most linear to the number of drives, but random access is still random access, and is still slow.What romrunning "invented" is a software stack that remaps sectors to make random logical access be physically sequential. I believe some company, maybe Fusion IO, did have something like this, though now that I look for it I can not find anything that is not Flash-based.
The idea can definitely work pretty well for speeding up random writes, but for reads it needs some quite good analysis and statistics about what the commonly read sequences are and does not seem too feasible. Maybe that's why they dropped it and use flash caches.
Visual - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
And why this did not appear as a reply to the post i clicked 'reply' on (in a new tab)? Anandtech... get some web devs with a brain... it is not rocket science.shodanshok - Monday, December 15, 2014 - link
Modern copy-on-write filesystems as ZFS and BTRFS (and, to a limited extent, even classical filesystems as EXT4 and XFS) do exactly that. They transform random writes in sequential one, using the available space similar to a circular log buffer.For write-intensive, read-insensitive workload they are a great choice, but for some common scenario (eg: databases) they performs quite poorly. Moreover, the resulting files are often very, very much fragmented, leading to very log read performance (when used on top of spinning disks).
For more information and some benchmarks:
- http://www.ilsistemista.net/index.php/linux-a-unix...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_s...
Regards.
akula2 - Thursday, December 18, 2014 - link
This review has some misses w.r.t Enterprise segment. Hardware architecture isn't great. Most importantly this implementation isn't suitable to employers with hundreds of employees accessing data from multiple nations. Lastly, based on my five years of experience in deploying NAS solutions in my businesses I observed Seagate drives fail more than their Hitachi counterparts.intiims - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
Great topic, usefull information.If You want to Read more about External Hard Drives visit: http://www.hddmag.com/