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The simple answer is that the software stack necessary for consumers to effectively use these storage devices does not yet exist. Hyperscalers are pretty much d
by wtallis 3y ago
The simple answer is that the software stack necessary for consumers to effectively use these storage devices does not yet exist. Hyperscalers are pretty much defined as the ones who are big enough to do their own software stack. For the rest of us, we have some good components to work with but also some major gaps that won't be filled anytime soon.
ZFS is a great improvement over traditional hardware RAID systems, but is still in many ways clearly a descendant of them. BTRFS has a slightly different mix of features from ZFS that make it a bit more flexible and a better choice for consumers who don't buy drives by the dozen. Neither has a great solution for caching/tiering with SSDs and hard drives. Ceph has a lot of features that would otherwise be almost exclusive to the hyperscalers, but is too complicated for something like a turnkey NAS. bcachefs aspires to eventually have most of the features you would want for a non-clustered storage system.
Zoned storage is something many of the above already have some degree of support for, but as a paradigm it has not even started showing up in the consumer computing ecosystem so many of the issues with adopting zoned storage for consumer systems aren't even being worked on.
- XorNot 3y agoZFS has the concept of a separate intent log device though, I wonder if that would be enough to make these types of disks work with it? I have no problem putting a couple of terabytes of flash in front of a ZFS array if it means I can have 40TB of redundant storage in 3 disks.
- wtallis 3y agoThe ZFS intent log is an example of a supremely disappointing, underwhelming way to integrate SSD storage into your system. Fundamentally, it's just a workaround for the fact that most of the write caches preexisting in the storage stack are volatile caches and thus not safe. Putting the ZIL on an SSD allows you to get the safety without sacrificing the performance benefits of the write caching (performance that everyone has come to rely on). But the ZIL doesn't help with read performance, and the data you write to it is never even read unless you have a crash or power failure. And then for the read caching, ZFS has L2ARC as an entirely separate feature. So ZFS does technically have ways to take advantage of SSDs to improve a hard drive storage array—but I don't think anyone would consider it to be an ideal solution, more of a pragmatic minimum viable feature.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wmf 3y agoY'all keep saying "these" but SMR and HAMR are unrelated.
- wtallis 3y agoIn theory, yes, but the bottom of the article explains that Seagate currently plans for their upcoming 24TB drive to be the last new non-SMR drive and all larger drives (28+ TB) are planned to be SMR. So in practice SMR and HAMR will be going hand in hand, at least from this vendor.
- wmf 3y agoThat's not my interpretation but we'll see.
- wtallis 3y ago> "So, we have a 24TB coming out soon, next few months, you will see it," said Romano. "That is the last PMR product. So I would say [higher] capacity point above 24TB PMR, that is probably 28TB SMR." Sounds like the only uncertainty is in what the next capacity past 24TB will be, but it'll definitely be SMR rather than PMR.
- awiesenhofer 3y agoI agree this part is a bit ambigous, but it says somewhere before this that the next drives to be released will be a 22TB and 28TB SMR drive. So I read this comment as "after this last 24TB PMR drive there will be the 28TB SMR drive before we will see the 32TB+ HAMR drives going forward" - so to me he was more talking purely about upcoming sizes rather than technology connections and SMR seems to be on its way out too!?
- 76fd767f7f77f7f 3y ago[dead]