Seagate Mach.2 Dual Actuator HDDs | Investigating How They Actually Work

In this video I'm investigating the Seagate Mach.2 dual actuator HDD technology. These drives have the potential to make a massive leap forward in HDD performance both for bandwidth and IOPS. We'll examine what Seagate has to say about their technology and I will share with you my thoughts. Also, we'll setup one of these Mach.2 drives in my server to check out how it actually works. Then, we'll run some benchmarks on the individual halves and also on a RAID-0 composed of both "halves" using Linux mdadm. Finally, I'll give my thoughts on the benchmark results and considerations for using these Mach.2 drives in RAID parity setups like RAID-5/6 or ZFS raidz1/2/3.

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Timestamps:
0:03 - Introducing the Seagate Mach.2 Exos 2X14 HDD
0:48 - Seagate's explanation of dual actuator HDDs
1:28 - Advantages of Mach.2 dual actuator drives
1:50 - My thoughts on the advantages of dual actuator drives
3:50 - Setting up the Mach.2 in my test server
5:32 - Examining the Mach.2 HDD in Linux
6:33 - Examining Linux logs to see how the Mach.2 presents itself to the OS
10:50 - Checking the SAS-3 link with lsiutil
11:21 - Examining SMART data of Mach.2 drive with smartctl
13:13 - Fio benchmark sequential read test on individual "sides" of the Mach.2
14:44 - Fio benchmark sequential write test on individual "sides" of the Mach.2
15:35 - Fio benchmark random read test on individual "sides" of the Mach.2
16:27 - Creating RAID-0 with Linux mdadm on Mach.2 drives
17:19 - Fio benchmark sequential read test on Mach.2 RAID-0
19:36 - Fio benchmark sequential write test on Mach.2 RAID-0
19:51 - Fio benchmark random read test on Mach.2 RAID-0
20:33 - Linux mdadm RAID-0 might not be optimized for Mach.2 technology
21:15 - My thoughts about Mach.2 vs traditional single actuator HDDs
22:16 - Considerations for RAID parity setups (RAID5/6, ZFS raidz1/2/3)
23:21 - Outro

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