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> hard drives having moved entirely into the market traditionally occupied by tape It'll be curious if the hyperscale clouds decide to self-manage more HDD fun
by ethbr0 6y ago
> hard drives having moved entirely into the market traditionally occupied by tape
It'll be curious if the hyperscale clouds decide to self-manage more HDD functions, and dumb down the devices ($), or leave that to HDD manufacturers ($$).
I imagine there's some savings to be had stripping memory & controllers out of drives, when you're deploying in large groups anyway. Similar to what was done with networking kit.
Or maybe this already happens? Moreso than "RAID-edition" drives.
- gbrown_ 6y agoDepending on what you mean by "dumb down" Seagate have their Kinetic stuff presenting an object API which is could be viewed as simpler but arguably the drive is doing more.
- wtallis 6y agoHard drives already present a fairly minimal abstraction over the underlying media. For most drives, it can't get any simpler unless the host system software wants to get bogged down with media and vendor-specific details about things like error correction. For drives using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR), the storage protocols have already been extended to present a zoned storage model, so that drives don't have to be responsible for the huge read-modify-write operations necessary to make SMR behave like a traditional block storage device. I suspect these Host-Managed SMR drives are not equipped with the larger caches found on consumer drive-managed SMR hard drives.