1 00:00:00,400 --> 00:00:06,960 Seagate archive drives. These things are 2 00:00:03,840 --> 00:00:09,760 freaking cheap for how much capacity you 3 00:00:06,960 --> 00:00:14,240 get. I can actually link my drive cost calculator spreadsheet that I used to 4 00:00:12,160 --> 00:00:18,960 make this chart under the video, by the way. But when I started looking into 5 00:00:16,480 --> 00:00:25,199 picking up some of these drives for our long-term storage NAS, I heard the 6 00:00:22,320 --> 00:00:30,480 performance totally sucked. So, I asked Seagate to send a few of them over, and 7 00:00:27,359 --> 00:00:33,120 I went on a mission to figure out if 8 00:00:30,480 --> 00:00:39,200 there's a way to mask their performance penalty while still getting the cost 9 00:00:35,680 --> 00:00:42,559 benefit to build the cheapest 100 TBTE 10 00:00:39,200 --> 00:00:44,879 storage box possible. Well, my original 11 00:00:42,559 --> 00:00:48,879 concept ended up totally not working. That's a new one, right? But I learned a 12 00:00:47,280 --> 00:01:00,239 bunch of interesting stuff in the process, and here it is. 13 00:01:00,239 --> 00:01:07,680 Cooler Master's Mastercase Maker 5 features their free form modular system, 14 00:01:05,119 --> 00:01:12,000 allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in 15 00:01:09,920 --> 00:01:18,080 the video description. Now, before I can explain why archive 16 00:01:14,960 --> 00:01:21,280 drives are so cheap and at the same time 17 00:01:18,080 --> 00:01:23,520 why their performance is less than ideal 18 00:01:21,280 --> 00:01:28,320 for certain applications, we need a little bit of background. Without 19 00:01:25,439 --> 00:01:34,079 getting into too much grimy detail, data is stored on hard drives by arranging 20 00:01:30,560 --> 00:01:36,960 the polarity of the tiny magnets that 21 00:01:34,079 --> 00:01:41,119 cover the hard discshaped thing inside called a platter according to the 22 00:01:39,200 --> 00:01:46,880 instructions given by your operating system. A magnetized bit is interpreted 23 00:01:44,079 --> 00:01:52,320 as a one and a non-magnetized bit is interpreted as a zero. So you lay down a 24 00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:56,720 few billion ones and zeros in the right order, read them back, and boom, next 25 00:01:54,560 --> 00:02:02,399 thing you know, you're playing Crisis 3. Okay, then. So, traditionally, these 26 00:01:59,040 --> 00:02:05,520 little magnets were arranged laying flat 27 00:02:02,399 --> 00:02:08,319 in concentric circles on the platter. 28 00:02:05,520 --> 00:02:14,800 This is called longitudinal magnetic recording. It's easier. But eventually, 29 00:02:11,599 --> 00:02:17,360 hard drive manufacturers ran out of room 30 00:02:14,800 --> 00:02:22,239 and couldn't increase capacity anymore without making their platters so big 31 00:02:19,840 --> 00:02:26,640 that the latency penalty of moving the read and write heads around would be too 32 00:02:24,640 --> 00:02:31,200 high. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure that no one wants a 10 terbte disc 33 00:02:29,120 --> 00:02:36,640 in their laptop if it has to be the size of a vinyl freaking record. So the first 34 00:02:33,840 --> 00:02:42,239 solution then was perpendicular magnetic recording. standing those magnets up 35 00:02:39,840 --> 00:02:46,879 instead of laying them down. This required more complex read and write 36 00:02:44,400 --> 00:02:51,040 heads, the uh the record needle type ARM that moves around and makes that ticking 37 00:02:49,519 --> 00:02:58,000 noise whenever your drive is working hard, but has gotten us all the way to 38 00:02:54,640 --> 00:02:59,680 10 terabytes so far with maybe a little 39 00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:05,120 bit more headroom left before the magnets again just can't get any 40 00:03:02,400 --> 00:03:10,640 smaller, which is where shingled magnetic recording comes in. Now the 41 00:03:08,159 --> 00:03:16,239 read component of the head, remember the record needle thing, is narrower than 42 00:03:13,440 --> 00:03:22,000 the right component. So by layering the magnetic tracks half on top of each 43 00:03:19,200 --> 00:03:27,360 other, like the shingles on a roof, much more data can be stored without moving 44 00:03:24,480 --> 00:03:32,879 to more exotic materials to make the magnets smaller or even drastically 45 00:03:29,920 --> 00:03:38,159 redesigning the heads. Unfortunately, this means that while you can read at 46 00:03:35,440 --> 00:03:42,560 pretty much full speed, the 8 TBTE archive drives that we used for our test 47 00:03:40,159 --> 00:03:46,959 are rated at 190 megabytes per second reads, way more than enough for the 48 00:03:45,120 --> 00:03:52,239 gigabit networks that most home and small office users are running. Write 49 00:03:49,360 --> 00:03:58,400 speeds can be devastatingly slow, especially when they're random. You see, 50 00:03:55,120 --> 00:04:01,360 the right head is so wide that it would 51 00:03:58,400 --> 00:04:07,439 actually overwrite both the intended track and the next one over on the 52 00:04:04,560 --> 00:04:12,159 drive. So, it has to read the data that it's going to accidentally overwrite. 53 00:04:09,920 --> 00:04:16,639 store that somewhere else, either in a solid state cache or in a reserved part 54 00:04:14,560 --> 00:04:21,440 of the disk platter somewhere else, organize it, and then finally 55 00:04:19,040 --> 00:04:26,000 sequentially write back both the data it's supposed to be writing in the first 56 00:04:22,960 --> 00:04:28,560 place and that data it had to shuffle. 57 00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:35,680 This is called a read modify write and it can be slow as all hell. So, let's 58 00:04:32,240 --> 00:04:38,320 talk then about my idea. I wanted to use 59 00:04:35,680 --> 00:04:45,360 the reasonable read speeds, the low cost, and the 247 operation ratings of 60 00:04:41,840 --> 00:04:48,479 archive drives in one of my lime unrade 61 00:04:45,360 --> 00:04:51,280 systems. I wanted to combine that with 62 00:04:48,479 --> 00:04:56,160 the reliability and all-around high performance of enterprise capacity 63 00:04:53,520 --> 00:05:01,520 drives to get the best of both worlds. So the way unrade works is that your 64 00:04:58,639 --> 00:05:05,120 data is actually written directly to the individual discs in the array which is 65 00:05:03,840 --> 00:05:09,600 great because in the event of a catastrophic failure let's say you lose 66 00:05:07,039 --> 00:05:14,080 two drives simultaneously at least anything written to the rest of the 67 00:05:10,960 --> 00:05:17,199 drives is still there and an additional 68 00:05:14,080 --> 00:05:20,320 drive or two drives acts as a parody 69 00:05:17,199 --> 00:05:22,240 disc that lets data from a single or two 70 00:05:20,320 --> 00:05:28,560 depending how many parody discs you have failed discs be rebuilt in the event of 71 00:05:25,120 --> 00:05:31,280 a less catastrophic failure. The problem 72 00:05:28,560 --> 00:05:37,039 is that while archive drives seem to be okay as standalone individual discs, the 73 00:05:34,400 --> 00:05:41,919 worst use case I could find for them was in parody protected RAID arrays with 74 00:05:39,919 --> 00:05:47,919 their poor random performance being pointed to as an unnecessary risk during 75 00:05:45,280 --> 00:05:52,960 a rebuild operation. So the data rebuilding process actually puts more 76 00:05:50,800 --> 00:05:58,320 strain than normal on the rest of the drives. And so the data across all the 77 00:05:55,759 --> 00:06:03,600 discs is in jeopardy until the corrupted or failed drives data has been rebuilt. 78 00:06:01,680 --> 00:06:09,440 So now we're 70% of the way through the video and we finally come to my idea. I 79 00:06:06,880 --> 00:06:15,759 figured by using archive drives in the array and an enterprise drive for parody 80 00:06:13,520 --> 00:06:21,680 and to replace any failed archive drives, I could mask both the poor 81 00:06:18,639 --> 00:06:25,280 random write performance and the slow 82 00:06:21,680 --> 00:06:27,199 rebuild times of the archive drives. And 83 00:06:25,280 --> 00:06:31,840 as you'll see from these performance numbers, it didn't work out that way at 84 00:06:29,520 --> 00:06:37,199 all. So uh my heterogeneous drive mixture configuration had worse 85 00:06:34,160 --> 00:06:41,039 performance than both all enterprise 86 00:06:37,199 --> 00:06:44,080 capacity drives which I expected and 87 00:06:41,039 --> 00:06:46,800 worse than a pure archive drive setup 88 00:06:44,080 --> 00:06:50,720 which I suspect is due to the mismatched disc spindle speed. So, that's kind of a 89 00:06:49,120 --> 00:06:55,600 drag, I guess. But there's some good news here for me anyway. And that is 90 00:06:53,120 --> 00:07:00,160 that in an unrade environment, I can either settle for 50 megabyte per second 91 00:06:58,319 --> 00:07:04,080 write speeds, about half of what a gigabit network can handle, in the 92 00:07:02,000 --> 00:07:08,000 default configuration where it spins up only the disc to which it's writing 93 00:07:05,759 --> 00:07:11,120 directly, and the parody disc to reduce power consumption and discare at the 94 00:07:09,520 --> 00:07:15,520 cost of performing read modify write operations all the time. Or if I use 95 00:07:13,199 --> 00:07:21,440 their turborite mode that spins all the discs during access, allowing for much 96 00:07:18,080 --> 00:07:23,759 faster reconstruct writes, I can still, 97 00:07:21,440 --> 00:07:28,720 even with the cheapest drives I could find that are rated for 247 operation, 98 00:07:26,560 --> 00:07:34,000 get my 100 megabytes per second since I'm not striping data the way that I 99 00:07:31,520 --> 00:07:38,560 would in a more traditional RAID, which to be clear, archive drives still are 100 00:07:36,560 --> 00:07:41,199 not recommended for. So, thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, 101 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:45,759 you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or maybe even check out the link 102 00:07:44,479 --> 00:07:50,080 to where to buy the stuff that we featured at Amazon. In the video 103 00:07:47,759 --> 00:07:54,639 description, I have my full hard drive like NAS capacity and price calculator 104 00:07:52,639 --> 00:07:57,680 Excel sheet down there, which you can, you're more than welcome to try out. 105 00:07:56,319 --> 00:08:03,039 Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which 106 00:08:01,039 --> 00:08:06,720 you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. 107 00:08:05,280 --> 00:08:12,080 So, click that little button in the top right corner to check out our video from 108 00:08:09,520 --> 00:08:15,840 last year, which inspired a lot of this storage server stuff that I've been 109 00:08:13,520 --> 00:08:20,400 doing, where we lost pretty much all of our data 110 00:08:17,680 --> 00:08:22,800 temporarily. Or did I ruin the suspense? I don't know.