Western Digital has today presented its latest effort to catch up with traditional QLC NAND Flash SSDs by improving its HDD offerings. With the latest High-Bandwidth HDDs, Western Digital has implemented two new technologies in a classical multi-platter HDD design. The first innovation comes in a fo...
Dual-actuator heads always scare me. Hard disks are already insane precision mechanical instruments.
It looks like the pivots are on opposite sides of the disk platters, which means that if one fails you essentially lose access to the data on that side.
That’s not really appreciably different from the same failure happening in a single-pivot drive, though it is more mechanical complexity packed into the same amount of space.
I’m not sure what the failure rates on HDD pivots are like. In my own experience the control board or motor is more likely to fail.
They scare you because you’re concerned about failure rate?
More like the complexity and precision needed to make it work, at mass produced volumes. But I guess you could translate that to feat of unreliability.
Undoubtedly going to have a higher failure rate, however in my experience WD’s enterprise drives are extremely high reliability regardless.
Once these hit the surplus market in ~5 years they’ll be neat (if we get them in SATA) for ZFS RAID arrays; faster rebuild speeds will be nice.
I already pre-bought drives for the replacement / expansion of my ZFS pool as the current drives fail so I’m locked into old technology for likely many years. 😔