Seagate archive drives. These things are
freaking cheap for how much capacity you
get. I can actually link my drive cost calculator spreadsheet that I used to
make this chart under the video, by the way. But when I started looking into
picking up some of these drives for our long-term storage NAS, I heard the
performance totally sucked. So, I asked Seagate to send a few of them over, and
I went on a mission to figure out if
there's a way to mask their performance penalty while still getting the cost
benefit to build the cheapest 100 TBTE
storage box possible. Well, my original
concept ended up totally not working. That's a new one, right? But I learned a
bunch of interesting stuff in the process, and here it is.
Cooler Master's Mastercase Maker 5 features their free form modular system,
allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in
the video description. Now, before I can explain why archive
drives are so cheap and at the same time
why their performance is less than ideal
for certain applications, we need a little bit of background. Without
getting into too much grimy detail, data is stored on hard drives by arranging
the polarity of the tiny magnets that
cover the hard discshaped thing inside called a platter according to the
instructions given by your operating system. A magnetized bit is interpreted
as a one and a non-magnetized bit is interpreted as a zero. So you lay down a
few billion ones and zeros in the right order, read them back, and boom, next
thing you know, you're playing Crisis 3. Okay, then. So, traditionally, these
little magnets were arranged laying flat
in concentric circles on the platter.
This is called longitudinal magnetic recording. It's easier. But eventually,
hard drive manufacturers ran out of room
and couldn't increase capacity anymore without making their platters so big
that the latency penalty of moving the read and write heads around would be too
high. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure that no one wants a 10 terbte disc
in their laptop if it has to be the size of a vinyl freaking record. So the first
solution then was perpendicular magnetic recording. standing those magnets up
instead of laying them down. This required more complex read and write
heads, the uh the record needle type ARM that moves around and makes that ticking
noise whenever your drive is working hard, but has gotten us all the way to
10 terabytes so far with maybe a little
bit more headroom left before the magnets again just can't get any
smaller, which is where shingled magnetic recording comes in. Now the
read component of the head, remember the record needle thing, is narrower than
the right component. So by layering the magnetic tracks half on top of each
other, like the shingles on a roof, much more data can be stored without moving
to more exotic materials to make the magnets smaller or even drastically
redesigning the heads. Unfortunately, this means that while you can read at
pretty much full speed, the 8 TBTE archive drives that we used for our test
are rated at 190 megabytes per second reads, way more than enough for the
gigabit networks that most home and small office users are running. Write
speeds can be devastatingly slow, especially when they're random. You see,
the right head is so wide that it would
actually overwrite both the intended track and the next one over on the
drive. So, it has to read the data that it's going to accidentally overwrite.
store that somewhere else, either in a solid state cache or in a reserved part
of the disk platter somewhere else, organize it, and then finally
sequentially write back both the data it's supposed to be writing in the first
place and that data it had to shuffle.
This is called a read modify write and it can be slow as all hell. So, let's
talk then about my idea. I wanted to use
the reasonable read speeds, the low cost, and the 247 operation ratings of
archive drives in one of my lime unrade
systems. I wanted to combine that with
the reliability and all-around high performance of enterprise capacity
drives to get the best of both worlds. So the way unrade works is that your
data is actually written directly to the individual discs in the array which is
great because in the event of a catastrophic failure let's say you lose
two drives simultaneously at least anything written to the rest of the
drives is still there and an additional
drive or two drives acts as a parody
disc that lets data from a single or two
depending how many parody discs you have failed discs be rebuilt in the event of
a less catastrophic failure. The problem
is that while archive drives seem to be okay as standalone individual discs, the
worst use case I could find for them was in parody protected RAID arrays with
their poor random performance being pointed to as an unnecessary risk during
a rebuild operation. So the data rebuilding process actually puts more
strain than normal on the rest of the drives. And so the data across all the
discs is in jeopardy until the corrupted or failed drives data has been rebuilt.
So now we're 70% of the way through the video and we finally come to my idea. I
figured by using archive drives in the array and an enterprise drive for parody
and to replace any failed archive drives, I could mask both the poor
random write performance and the slow
rebuild times of the archive drives. And
as you'll see from these performance numbers, it didn't work out that way at
all. So uh my heterogeneous drive mixture configuration had worse
performance than both all enterprise
capacity drives which I expected and
worse than a pure archive drive setup
which I suspect is due to the mismatched disc spindle speed. So, that's kind of a
drag, I guess. But there's some good news here for me anyway. And that is
that in an unrade environment, I can either settle for 50 megabyte per second
write speeds, about half of what a gigabit network can handle, in the
default configuration where it spins up only the disc to which it's writing
directly, and the parody disc to reduce power consumption and discare at the
cost of performing read modify write operations all the time. Or if I use
their turborite mode that spins all the discs during access, allowing for much
faster reconstruct writes, I can still,
even with the cheapest drives I could find that are rated for 247 operation,
get my 100 megabytes per second since I'm not striping data the way that I
would in a more traditional RAID, which to be clear, archive drives still are
not recommended for. So, thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked,
you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or maybe even check out the link
to where to buy the stuff that we featured at Amazon. In the video
description, I have my full hard drive like NAS capacity and price calculator
Excel sheet down there, which you can, you're more than welcome to try out.
Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which
you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next.
So, click that little button in the top right corner to check out our video from
last year, which inspired a lot of this storage server stuff that I've been
doing, where we lost pretty much all of our data
temporarily. Or did I ruin the suspense? I don't know.