Re: [gentoo-user] Seagate hard drives with dual actuators.

[Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk>]

On 14/11/2024 20:33, Dale wrote:
> It's one thing that kinda gets on my nerves about SMR.  It seems, 
> sounds, like they tried to hide it from people to make money.  Thing is, 
> as some learned, they don't do well in a RAID and some other 
> situations.  Heck, they do OK reading but when writing, they can get 
> real slow when writing a lot of data.  Then you have to wait until it 
> gets done redoing things so that it is complete.

Incidentally, when I looked up HAMR (I didn't know what it was) it's 
touted as making SMR obsolete. I can see why ...

And dual actuator? I would have thought that would be good for SMR 
drives. Not that I have a clue how they work internally, but I would 
have thought it made sense to have zones and a streaming log-structured 
layout. So when the user is using it, you're filling up the zones, and 
then when the drive has "free time", it takes a full zone that has the 
largest "freed/dead space" and streams it to the current zone, one 
actuator to read and one to write. Indeed, it could possibly do that 
while the drive is being used ...

Cheers,
Wol