While it is still nice to see hard drive performance move forward, using a 12 GBit interface is serious overkill. It'd only make sense in environments with mixed hard drives and SSDs on the same SAS bus, which is rather rare. As long as there isn't a price premium over 6 Gbit drives, I guess there really isn't much to complain about though.
These magnetic drives have quite impressive performance in sequential reads, so a fast interface is good - especially as it can multiplex requests and responses (accepts requests while delivering sequential data)
HDD manufacturers have very close relationships with OEM's, to the point where it's normal for an OEM to request a particular product type to be engineered and manufactured. This seems to be another one of those products.
Nah, it is the next logical small incremental step to mark some progress. Better caching should have long been applied to all mechanical storage drives, not just now and only for enterprise. Instead of that we get warranty sacking...
Damn, I really wish that Hitachi was still in the consumer space and price competitive with the other HDD manufacturers. I've got two 2TB Hitachi drives that survived newer Seagate and WD drives. I've never encountered drives that were so damn reliable.
Hitachi consumer drives are no harder to find today than they were a year ago... B&H has the 4TB Hitachi drives. $150 for the 5400RPM version, $175 for the 7200RPM version.
Yeah, I don't even know who B&H is. Up here in Canada a 2TB UltraStar is about $160, but that's the only consumer/prosumer version available. The rest are enterprise versions, with a 3TB from $230 to $330 CAD and a 4TB at $330+. At least I can get the Toshiba drives for close to consumer prices. Not that I expect anything decent to match prices with the typical WD or Seagate crap (I did pick up 2 WD Reds to sit in a storage pool, but that's different).
I'll keep an eye out, but aside from SSDs, which are all dropping in price, computer prices seem to have stabilized up here, when they didn't go up like RAM.
Errm, I live in Montreal, which is probably more "up" in Canada than, say, Toronto :P
B&H is a camera store in NYC. They ship to Canada at very reasonable rates, and are often cheaper than Canadian stores even after you take shipping into account. In fact, I've often seen the cost of B&H's shipping and duties come out to less than what a Canadian store wanted for shipping alone...
HGST drives are indeed not that easy to find directly in Canada, but that's not really an issue. B&H sells the coolspin 4TB HGST for $149 USD, they want ~$9 for shipping, and ~$11 for GST and customs clearance... comes out to $170 USD.
Thing is, when I bought those drives for my file server (from B&H, shipped to Montreal), I bought seven of them. And the shipping costs don't scale linearly, so you end up paying $29 shipping on seven drives, instead of $9 shipping on one drive. It works out to actually paying ~$161 per drive instead of $170.
WD taking people for chumps with those claims of "media cache closer to the head" nonsense. Seriously, "improved cache" would have been better than this snake oil nonsense.
I wonder what the effect is on bit rot. Not that an enterprise system is going to keep a lot of idle information, but considering that the drive is actually rewriting the data across sectors as part of it's caching system should have a hopefully positive effect.
Any modern drive is constantly dealing with bit rot, every time you write data to a drive some amount of (accumulative) damage is done to nearby tracks of data. The repair is handled by the drive, business as usual...
RE: "media cache closer to the head" This actually makes sense. The heads usually idles back towards the middle of the drive. If that's where the "media cache" location is, then indeed it is closer to the head, and the drive can start writing to the disk immediately instead of having to move the head to the actual location first.
And how much does it cost? The 1.2TB version of this drive has a street price of nearly $800. At these sort of prices, I can't see what the potential market for this drive would be. It has a huge price premium over enterprise 7200RPM drives, and much lower performance than enterprise SSDs. Is there really any need for a drive that sits in the middle, when you can just go multi-tier and combine a bunch of cheaper 7200RPM drives with SSDs for caching?
Yeah, it's hard to understand how 1.2TB for $800 is better than a couple of 1TB SSD's, aside from the SSD's taking up more ports. I can't imagine a this drive will be much more reliable than an SSD or, like you said, 7200RPM drives with SSD's for caching. I guess some people just want their "reliable" rotational storage. Maybe the non-volatile cache really pumps up performance to the point where it's worth the price.
An all-SSD solution has a big price premium over these drives ($7600 for three ST800FM0053 solid state drives, vs. $1600 for two of these), and SSD caching works well only for certain workloads, so Hitachi is probably right that there is a market for these drives. But I bet the market is a lot smaller than it would have been a few years ago.
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19 Comments
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Kevin G - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
While it is still nice to see hard drive performance move forward, using a 12 GBit interface is serious overkill. It'd only make sense in environments with mixed hard drives and SSDs on the same SAS bus, which is rather rare. As long as there isn't a price premium over 6 Gbit drives, I guess there really isn't much to complain about though.Bob N - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Any cached command, read or write, can take place at the full 12Gb interface speed.Calin - Friday, July 11, 2014 - link
These magnetic drives have quite impressive performance in sequential reads, so a fast interface is good - especially as it can multiplex requests and responses (accepts requests while delivering sequential data)hlmcompany - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
HDD manufacturers have very close relationships with OEM's, to the point where it's normal for an OEM to request a particular product type to be engineered and manufactured. This seems to be another one of those products.ddriver - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Nah, it is the next logical small incremental step to mark some progress. Better caching should have long been applied to all mechanical storage drives, not just now and only for enterprise. Instead of that we get warranty sacking...Paul Tarnowski - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Damn, I really wish that Hitachi was still in the consumer space and price competitive with the other HDD manufacturers. I've got two 2TB Hitachi drives that survived newer Seagate and WD drives. I've never encountered drives that were so damn reliable.Mentawl - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
You should check out Toshiba drives, they're basically Hitachi's with a different name - same factories and all.http://www.anandtech.com/show/5635/western-digital...
Guspaz - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Hitachi consumer drives are no harder to find today than they were a year ago... B&H has the 4TB Hitachi drives. $150 for the 5400RPM version, $175 for the 7200RPM version.Paul Tarnowski - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
Yeah, I don't even know who B&H is. Up here in Canada a 2TB UltraStar is about $160, but that's the only consumer/prosumer version available. The rest are enterprise versions, with a 3TB from $230 to $330 CAD and a 4TB at $330+. At least I can get the Toshiba drives for close to consumer prices. Not that I expect anything decent to match prices with the typical WD or Seagate crap (I did pick up 2 WD Reds to sit in a storage pool, but that's different).I'll keep an eye out, but aside from SSDs, which are all dropping in price, computer prices seem to have stabilized up here, when they didn't go up like RAM.
Guspaz - Sunday, July 13, 2014 - link
Errm, I live in Montreal, which is probably more "up" in Canada than, say, Toronto :PB&H is a camera store in NYC. They ship to Canada at very reasonable rates, and are often cheaper than Canadian stores even after you take shipping into account. In fact, I've often seen the cost of B&H's shipping and duties come out to less than what a Canadian store wanted for shipping alone...
HGST drives are indeed not that easy to find directly in Canada, but that's not really an issue. B&H sells the coolspin 4TB HGST for $149 USD, they want ~$9 for shipping, and ~$11 for GST and customs clearance... comes out to $170 USD.
Thing is, when I bought those drives for my file server (from B&H, shipped to Montreal), I bought seven of them. And the shipping costs don't scale linearly, so you end up paying $29 shipping on seven drives, instead of $9 shipping on one drive. It works out to actually paying ~$161 per drive instead of $170.
ddriver - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
WD taking people for chumps with those claims of "media cache closer to the head" nonsense. Seriously, "improved cache" would have been better than this snake oil nonsense.ganeshts - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
This is non-volatile cache - Power loss doesn't mean data loss.Usually, the 'cache' that people talk about with hard drives is DRAM buffer.
This is an improvement over the short stroke technology that Hitachi pioneered in the late 2000s.
Paul Tarnowski - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
I wonder what the effect is on bit rot. Not that an enterprise system is going to keep a lot of idle information, but considering that the drive is actually rewriting the data across sectors as part of it's caching system should have a hopefully positive effect.Bob N - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Any modern drive is constantly dealing with bit rot, every time you write data to a drive some amount of (accumulative) damage is done to nearby tracks of data. The repair is handled by the drive, business as usual...Zap - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
RE: "media cache closer to the head"This actually makes sense. The heads usually idles back towards the middle of the drive. If that's where the "media cache" location is, then indeed it is closer to the head, and the drive can start writing to the disk immediately instead of having to move the head to the actual location first.
Guspaz - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
And how much does it cost? The 1.2TB version of this drive has a street price of nearly $800. At these sort of prices, I can't see what the potential market for this drive would be. It has a huge price premium over enterprise 7200RPM drives, and much lower performance than enterprise SSDs. Is there really any need for a drive that sits in the middle, when you can just go multi-tier and combine a bunch of cheaper 7200RPM drives with SSDs for caching?cobrax5 - Thursday, July 10, 2014 - link
Yeah, it's hard to understand how 1.2TB for $800 is better than a couple of 1TB SSD's, aside from the SSD's taking up more ports. I can't imagine a this drive will be much more reliable than an SSD or, like you said, 7200RPM drives with SSD's for caching. I guess some people just want their "reliable" rotational storage. Maybe the non-volatile cache really pumps up performance to the point where it's worth the price.KAlmquist - Monday, July 14, 2014 - link
An all-SSD solution has a big price premium over these drives ($7600 for three ST800FM0053 solid state drives, vs. $1600 for two of these), and SSD caching works well only for certain workloads, so Hitachi is probably right that there is a market for these drives. But I bet the market is a lot smaller than it would have been a few years ago.Pork@III - Wednesday, July 9, 2014 - link
This drive has non ordinary consumer target. Wrong commens I read before mine.