3 years back WD put out a special variant of their Ultrastar He8 drives that ran a Ceph OSD on the drive itself that supported 2.5 Gbe to each drive over a SATA

3 years back WD put out a special variant of their Ultrastar He8 drives that ran a Ceph OSD on the drive itself that supported 2.5 Gbe to each drive over a SATA port with an odd and incompatible pinout. https://ceph.com/geen-categorie/500-osd-ceph-cluster/ https://ceph.com/geen-categorie/500-osd-ceph-cluster/ One thing to note, in that test they were using a chassis that limited the drives to two 1 Gbe connections but that's not a limitation of the drives. Now that WDLabs has fizzled out who knows what became of that platform, it was actually quite interesting but it wasn't really directly using the drive to natively support object storage, internally it was still presenting itself as a block device to the Ceph daemon running on it.