Western Digital Launches the Dual Actuator Ultrastar DC HS760 20 TB Hard Drive

[TheLostSwede]

Western Digital has launched its first dual actuator hard drive, in the shape of the Ultrastar DC HS760 Hard Drive, which is currently only available in a single 20 TB SKU. This places WD's new drive head to head with Seagates Exos X20 drives, although Seagate offers an 18 and a 20 TB SKU. WD offers the Ultrastar DC HS760 with a SAS interface, whereas Seagate offers its Exos drives with either SATA or SAS connectivity. Both companies are using traditional CMR platters that spin at 7,200 RPM.

WD didn't provide too many details when it comes to the performance of the Ultrastar DC HS760, as the company only claims it offers twice the sequential throughput and 1.7 times higher random performance compared with the Ultrastar DC HC560. WD appears to have a potential performance advantage over Seagate, as WD has integrated its OptiNAND technology based on WD's iNAND, which means that the Ultrastar DC HS760 should have at least twice as much cache as Seagates Exos X20 drives which top out at 256 MB. This is based on WD's DC HC560 drives which ship with 512 MB of cache. Just like Seagates Exos drives, the Ultrastar DC HS760 is a helium filled drive and WD claims 2.5 million MTBF time and offers a five year warranty. No pricing was revealed.



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[Panther_Seraphin]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

 

[thesmokingman]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

You can't be serious? Ignore the cost much??

 

[Leiesoldat]

WD Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB = 305 USD
Seagate 18TB Exos X18 = 300 USD

Micron 7450 PRO 15.36TB PCIe Gen4 1x4 NVMe = 1,750 USD
Intel DC P4510 SSDPE2KX080T801 2.5" U.2 8TB PCIe NVMe 3.1 x4 = 750 USD
Micron 9300 PRO Series MTFDHAL15T3TDP-1AT1ZABYY 2.5" U.2 15.36TB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 = 3,000 USD

Source: newegg.com


Yeah the prices for enterprise SSD's have a long way to go to catch up to spinning rust in terms of price efficiency per GB.

 

[80251]

Are larger HDD's more reliable than smaller HDD's or SSD's in the long term?

 

[Steevo]

I doubt flash based drives will ever be as affordable as spinners, or as good for long term storage and reliability.

 

[thesmokingman]

Are larger HDD's more reliable than smaller HDD's or SSD's in the long term?

There can be no stock answer to that as it all depends. The real crux however is who is storing this much data w/o backups?

 

[TumbleGeorge]

I doubt flash based drives will ever be as affordable as spinners, or as good for long term storage and reliability.

Oh, it will undoubtedly happen. It just won't be by this date 2022-2023, as we were promised a few years ago with various graphs of the price per gigabyte of storage crossing.

 

[Tomgang]

Hdd biggest asset over ssd. Is the price. So they are good for storage and backup of data. But that's it. For os and games i will not use a hdd.

But it is positive that they still spend time to make them faster. All throw these drives are SAS interfaces only for now.
To be consumer friendly, we need a sata version. All throw these new drives will not be cheap by hdd standards.

Fast hdd is still needed. I have a fast hdd my self for fastest possible storage and data transfer in my own pc. WD gold enterprise-class hdd and a wd red pro. So not the slowest hdd. But they are far from out competing an ssd. These new dual actuator drives are closer to close the gab for sata ssd. Nvme far from.

 

[Steevo]

Oh, it will undoubtedly happen. It just won't be by this date 2022-2023, as we were promised a few years ago with various graphs of the price per gigabyte of storage crossing.

That is assuming a fixed cost or price model for HDDs which is a common mistake. Two bearings, some aluminum platters, sputtering, a cheap controller and motor. As the price of solid state storage drops so does the cost of manufacturing spinners. Soon I bet we see composite cases with the electronics epoxied in for further cost savings and durability.

I don’t need 1Gbps of read or wrote speed for transfers from a phone, camera, camcorder, or storage media they use. I do need about 10TB of storage that is reliable and redundant, while not costing an arm or kidney.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

drops so does the cost of manufacturing spinners.

We have a divergence on how fast the price drop of HDD and SSD can be. Also, neglecting to describe the amount and types of the HDD component base is not helpful to the discussion.

 

[R-T-B]

Two bearings, some aluminum platters, sputtering, a cheap controller and motor.

Congratulations, you've made something but it doesn't store data.

There's A BIT more physical engineering involved.

 

[Canned Noodles]

I would love to know what one of these sounds like up close.

 

[freeagent]

You had me at dual actuators

 

[Minus Infinity]

You had me at dual actuators

dual actuators pfff, I'm waiting for quad actuators.

 

[chodaboy19]

I'd love to see some performance tests, 1.7x faster random R/W is a huge improvement if true.

 

[ymdhis]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

For the cost of a 4tb SSD (lowest end non-QLC model), I can get 16TB HDD (enterprise class). So no, they are definitely not getting redundant any day soon.

I'd love to see some performance tests, 1.7x faster random R/W is a huge improvement if true.

That's random read IOPS, and note that HDDs already have extremely low IOPS, so it's something like 200 vs 340 (while any SSD is 500x higher). Not really a big deal.
The sequential read can exceed SATA3 cable speed though, which is much more significant.

 

[thesmokingman]

I'd love to see some performance tests, 1.7x faster random R/W is a huge improvement if true.

It would still be slow as !@@#$ compared to an SSD. These are for storing large amounts of data, not accessing them as quickly as possible. Different purposes, different uses.

 

[claes]

Only review I could find if the Seagate equivalent released a couple of years ago:

Benchmarking Seagate Exos2X14 MACH.2 HDDs | croit

Seagate provided us with a few samples of their Exos2X14 Dual Actuator (MACH.2) HDDs. These disks come with two independent sets of read/write heads each with half the total capacity.

croit.io

 

[Dr. Dro]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

Bit rot also occurs in HDDs due to imprecise magnetism (which is ultra rare but can occur), and should only set in SSDs if the NAND is unpowered for an exceptionally long amount of time (years without seeing any use), meantime between failures (MTBF) of consumer-grade SSDs while in operation is still usually rated in the millions of hours.

Enterprise environments commonly have the extreme opposite high-uptime scenario, enterprise-grade HDDs are designed so their spindle doesn't give in and the actuator motors continue to be precise after years of continuous operation. SSDs eliminate this problem by their very nature, which makes that concern completely irrelevant.

A key argument is that HDDs have no practical limits to how much you can write and re-write to it, but my question is: Is it really relevant to your personal use case? I figure that even the most intense data hoarders usually write once and then read this data back many times over, for example, someone who has a vast collection of high-resolution movies.

This 12-year-old SSD from the height of the reliability FUD on forums has been on every build and device I've owned ever since I purchased it in 2011. It's been fully rewritten almost 150 times over, been used in a PS3, in a RAID array and had a page file installed on it for most of its service life, and it still retains 97% of its health:

Fine, this is a 2D MLC drive with backup capacitors and DRAM, basically bullet-proof compared to a low cost SSD today, but let's hypothesize: an "unreliable" QLC drive may be reprogrammed in its entirety only 50 times? OK, fine, but are you actually going to do that? I really wonder what are you storing... video games, music and video are usually the most intensive data sets in a computer, and they're invariably write once and read many (WORM) types of data.

Fact will remain that the HDDs indeed do have currently unmatched data density and their cost is significantly lower at the higher end of the per-device storage capacity, but for almost all use cases, I see SSDs effectively supplanting them entirely unless one must store dozens of terabytes of data at once, and even then these are, IMHO, best installed on a network-attached server instead of locally in the client computer.

I would argue that for all but the most massive data storage needs, HDDs are not only redundant: they've become obsolete.

 

[A&P211]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

I wonder with the reoccurant "bit-rot/loss" that seems to happen every so often with primarily Samsung drives will there always be a demand for Spinning Rust in certain areas of the business?

Its not the size but of cost. Some of us want large sizes spaces.

dual actuators pfff, I'm waiting for quad actuators.

I'm waiting on actuators with rgb. RGB that $hit....

 

[mechtech]

Time for TPU to get one for review, I mean since it's been so long since there has been a HDD review

 

[Prima.Vera]

HDD are definately in a phase of it possibly being redundant with how quick SSDs are gaining in terms of size.

You're joking, right?? SSDs are stuck on 4TB size for more than 5 years in a row now. While HDDs with bigger size are also inflating their prices.
It's a loss-loss for consumers from both sides...

 

[80251]

@Prima.Vera
There are at least a couple of manufacturers of 8 TiB SSD's now, Samsung is definitely one of those, they have the 8 TiB 870 QVO.

 

[Jism]

The Dual actuator tech is'nt new. It already was deployed back in the 90's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Peripherals#Performance_issues_and_the_"Chinook"_dual-actuator_drive

It was a SCSI based disk with twice the performance as with a disk with a single actuator, but had to be controlled by the SCSI controller itself rather then we see today. Basicly it was a 2 in 1 disk.

I think HDD manufactors where waiting too long and milking the idea of storage and it's wealthy position even before SSD was even available.

You'll see that in 10 years from now on HDD's become pretty much obsolete.