5 ms·

I think this is an incredibly interesting approach, and I hope Seagate open it up a little more. If we could run some computation on the drive, that could be i

I think this is an incredibly interesting approach, and I hope Seagate open it up a little more. If we could run some computation on the drive, that could be incredibly powerful. I can imagine that once these are SSD drives, paired with reasonably powerful (likely ARM) chips, that we'll have massively parallel storage architectures (GPU-like architectures for storage). We'll have massive aggregate CPU <-> disk bandwidth, while SSD + ARM should be very low power. We could do a raw search over all data in the time it takes to scan the flash on the local CPU, and only have to ship the relevant data over (slower) Ethernet for post-processing. I'd love to get my hands on a dev-kit :-)

agumonkey 13y ago
hard drives are already run by arm controllers http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hacking-hard-drive-controller-chips/ http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hackin... so your idea might happen sooner than expected
- mbq 13y ago
  Also SSDs implement an internal filesystem optimized for flash that emulates a block device to the outside. For this Kinetic Store, the controller would be quite likely even simpler.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    There would still be a need for ssd specific wear leveling and trim logic in the controller though
    - mbq 13y ago
      Trim is not needed if the disc directly gets delete commands, while wear leveling is actually a problem of spinning-optimized filesystems and can be solved easier if the external representation is a key-value store of immutable objects.
- Swannie 13y ago
  Yes... given they use the same connector on the HDD, I'm wondering if they actually need to change the hardware at all! The sprite breakdown identifies one core as managing the SAS commands, via DMA. Now how hard would it be to actually manage ethernet similarly, via a ARM core? If that's what they've actually done, that's really damn cool.
arkj 13y ago
Are you munching some number crunching?

agumonkey 13y ago

hard drives are already run by arm controllers http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hacking-hard-drive-controller-chips/ http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hackin... so your idea might happen sooner than expected

mbq 13y ago
Also SSDs implement an internal filesystem optimized for flash that emulates a block device to the outside. For this Kinetic Store, the controller would be quite likely even simpler.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  There would still be a need for ssd specific wear leveling and trim logic in the controller though
  - mbq 13y ago
    Trim is not needed if the disc directly gets delete commands, while wear leveling is actually a problem of spinning-optimized filesystems and can be solved easier if the external representation is a key-value store of immutable objects.
Swannie 13y ago
Yes... given they use the same connector on the HDD, I'm wondering if they actually need to change the hardware at all! The sprite breakdown identifies one core as managing the SAS commands, via DMA. Now how hard would it be to actually manage ethernet similarly, via a ARM core? If that's what they've actually done, that's really damn cool.

arkj 13y ago

Are you munching some number crunching?