The Gargantuan Steam Collection: A Guide to Storage Solutions for Gamers and Tech Enthusiasts

When it comes to storing games, saves, and backups, gamers and tech enthusiasts have several options to choose from. One of the most popular choices is flash storage, which offers faster performance than mechanical storage but still requires careful planning to maximize its benefits. However, with the latest advancements in technology, there are now more affordable and reliable storage solutions available.

One such solution is the dual actuator hard drive, which is designed for high-performance applications like gaming and content creation. This type of hard drive uses two actuators instead of one, allowing it to seek and retrieve information at incredibly fast speeds. With a read speed of over 250 megabytes per second, this type of hard drive can significantly improve the performance of your storage system.

For those interested in exploring the world of dual actuator hard drives, there are several options available. The most recent model, which is based on the Precision mechanical instrument, offers a staggering amount of storage capacity at an affordable price. This model comes with 18 terabytes of storage and can be purchased for under $400, making it an attractive option for those looking to upgrade their storage system.

However, there are also some considerations to keep in mind when choosing a dual actuator hard drive. For example, the SATA version of this drive may not be suitable for all applications, as it uses more power than older models and may require additional configuration to work properly. Additionally, the SAS version of the drive is generally more robust and better suited for Enterprise use cases.

One advantage of using a dual actuator hard drive in a desktop computer or NAS (Network-Attached Storage) system is that it offers significantly faster performance compared to standard mechanical hard drives. This is because dual actuator hard drives can read and write data at incredibly fast speeds, making them ideal for applications that require high-performance storage.

However, some users may not be aware of the benefits of using a dual actuator hard drive in their NAS system. For example, if you're planning to build a server around older Enterprise gear, it's generally recommended to use the SAS version of the drive instead of the SATA version. This is because SAS and Enterprise-grade storage systems are designed for more robust and reliable performance.

In addition, some users may not be aware that dual actuator hard drives can be used in standard desktop computers and NAS systems without any additional configuration or setup. While this may seem like a convenient option, it's worth noting that using a dual actuator hard drive in these systems will result in significantly faster performance compared to standard mechanical hard drives.

For those who are interested in exploring the world of dual actuator hard drives but don't want to jump into the command line and configure everything from scratch, there is some good news. Dual actuator hard drives can be easily integrated into standard desktop computers and NAS systems without any additional setup or configuration required. This makes them a convenient option for those who want to take advantage of high-performance storage without having to get too technical.

In fact, one popular NAS system, Asus Store, is designed with the flexibility in mind to work seamlessly with dual actuator hard drives. With its user-friendly interface and straightforward setup process, users can easily integrate these drives into their storage system and enjoy significantly faster performance.

However, if you're looking for a more advanced option or want to push the limits of your storage system, there is another option worth considering: the SAS version of the dual actuator hard drive. This version is designed specifically for Enterprise use cases and offers even more robust and reliable performance than the SATA version.

The SAS version of the dual actuator hard drive is designed for high-performance applications like gaming, content creation, and data storage. It uses advanced technologies like Advanced Power Management (APM) to optimize power consumption and reduce heat generation, making it ideal for use in high-density storage systems.

One advantage of using the SAS version of the dual actuator hard drive is that it offers significantly better performance than the SATA version. With read speeds of over 750 megabytes per second, this version is ideal for applications that require extremely fast data transfer rates.

Another advantage of the SAS version is its reliability and durability. Designed specifically for Enterprise use cases, this version is built to last with a longer warranty period and more robust construction than the SATA version.

For those who are interested in exploring the world of dual actuator hard drives but haven't tried them yet, there's one thing that's worth noting: the 45 drive storeinator or other Linux machines may have some limitations when it comes to using these drives. However, with a little bit of configuration and setup, you can still take advantage of the high-performance capabilities of dual actuator hard drives in your storage system.

In conclusion, the world of dual actuator hard drives is an exciting one for gamers, tech enthusiasts, and anyone looking to upgrade their storage system. With their incredible read speeds and robust construction, these drives are ideal for applications that require high-performance storage. Whether you're looking for a convenient option or want to push the limits of your storage system, there's a dual actuator hard drive available to meet your needs.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en18 terabytes Mach 2 the exos 2x18 Dual actuator it sure looks like mechanical hard drives are going to be with us for the foreseeable future but what if you could double the performance of a mechanical hard drive that's what dual actuator drives do dual actuator drives are a long overdue technology this is a SATA version of a dual actuator hard drive and 18 terabytes 18 terabytes is sort of the floor we're going to see capacities go even Beyond this this is actually a recertified Drive I bought these worked so well from seate they sent me some SAS versions of of these to review that uh I decided to buy the SATA version as well because everybody was really excited and then seate sent me some more dual actuator drives so I actually have a bunch of these we're going to take a look cuz using the SATA version of the drive is a little bit more interesting and a little different than the SAS version this actually just shows up as one drive unlike the SATA version uh for for those of you not in the know you're like what the drive shows up as two drives if you have a SAS version of the drive that's actually really handy because then you can deal with the fact that you've got two actuators two physical drives and one drive you can handle that however you want in software but for SATA drives SATA doesn't have that option so these drives uh deal with that a little bit more cleverly let's discuss okay so this shows up as one giant 18 tbte hard drive but if you create two partitions you can access the partitions independently yeah that's what I'm showing you here on crystal dis Mark we're running two Crystal dis Mark routines on this disc on one single disc and yet each one of these routines is able to retrieve 250 megabytes per second from each half of the disc to make sure that you understand this there's two sets of read r heads on two sets of platters inside the drive it's not like two sets of read RADS can read all of the platters the drives and the platters go together so you have a front half of the drive partition and a back half of the drive partition and each half of the drive is basically independent so you create two partitions and then if you create a raid zero of those two partitions you'll get double the performance turns out this is really easy to do on Native Linux we've got a shell script on the Forum if you're setting up say Linux MD you can use Linux MD or lvm and tell it hey these are uh dual actuator hard drives here is the geometry layout of the drive and it'll figure it out and then you're off to the races the really exciting thing about that as a practical matter is if you have if you have a Nas or network storage it takes just three of these drives to saturate a 10 gabit ethernet connection yeah so if you're doing something like with the sonology ds1618 plus that's got the new faster uh drive in it you're going to have to go to the command line on the sonology to set this up the sonology goey does not yet support this but I've got the full walkthrough on the level one forums you just need to make sure that the uh redundancy partitions are both on the same physical drive so that you can replace a drive uh most anology Nas have at least four Bays so you can just add like if you have a failure you just add a drive into the fourth Bay and let it finish resynchronizing and then you can pull the drive that you think died and then that if you make a mistake it it doesn't really matter but I'm getting ahead of myself let's talk dual actuators having dual actuators as a practical matter means that the time that it takes to read all of the information off of this disc is cut in half it's half the time it also means that for seate certifying and testing these drives also takes less time half time is which is nice for them but the fact that we have a mechanical hard drive a single mechanical hard drive will now saturate its 6 gbit per second SATA link sata 3 6 gbit we've been stuck at that SATA speed forever and now you're telling me that we have a single drive that is going to saturate that SATA link I'm telling you yes another interesting note is that the Linux kernel as of I think 6.1 or 6.2 uh added special support for dual actuator drives it'll work if you have an older Linux kernel and a device based on an older Linux kernel but specifically what it does is it reserves space in the command Cube see with SATA drives you can send a bunch of commands to the drive and the commands will buffer on the drive but the drive might service those commands out of order if it sees a more efficient way to do that cuz we're waiting on mechanical Parts here what the change to the Linux kernel does is it reserves some space in the buffer so if you have a a workload that really heavily loads one side of the drive it leaves some buffer space in the command queue for the other side to try to keep both sides of the drive uh loaded the reason that you want to do that is because if the buffer were completely filled for one side of the drive the other side of the drive would be idle and farther down the queue in terms of what's queued on the konel side as opposed to what's queued on the drive further down the queue there might have been something the colonel could send to the drive to make the other side busy while the first side was pegged so the fact that the colonel is now smart enough to say yeah those LBA sectors can be busy at the same time as these other LBA sectors it's nice to see those changes in the Linux kernel mechanical drives for bulk storage not really going anywhere it's also doubling in terms of iops if you're thinking you can deploy a dual actuator drive for your games Drive well media is probably a better choice or your Home Server storage Appliance bulk storage that kind of thing even the most gargantuan uh steam collection you're going to put you're going to want to put the games that you play on flash storage you could archive your saves or or do backups or something like that to Mechanical storage but there's still enough of a performance difference for random IO that you'll want flash as opposed to Mechanical storage but the fact that you can get 18 TB dual actuator hard drives like this is a Precision mechanical instrument for way less than $400 I get these recertified drives for like $200 uh that's pretty amazing and the recertified drives still have over a one-year warranty I think that when I checked these online uh these still had 20 months of of warranty remaining of course the new drives have a much longer warranty because seate exos and the exos line is designed for reliability and and long term usage and the business use case the Enterprise use case so little bit more stringent in terms of quality control and everything else if you have something you want me to try with a dual actuator hard drive or a dual actuator configuration let me know I would be glad to do that for me I've been really enjoying the performance the fact that three of these drives can saturate 10 gbit ethernet means that I need to upgrade and have more machines on the 100 gbit segment of my network 10 gbit is too slow what a what what a time to be alive a mechanical hard drive a mechanical hard drive is able to seek and retrieve information at over a billion bytes per second we live in the future need more more all right I'm wi this level one this has been a look at the SATA version of the Dual actuator hard drives if this sort of interests you be sure to check out the other video that we did on the SAS version if you have a 45 drive storinator or other machine a Linux machine that you're looking to set up with these the SATA version of these drives do work just fine in those drives be aware that they do use a little bit more power the older version of these drives this is the second generation dual actuator the first generation dual actuator used quite a bit more power these use a little bit more power do be aware that some Drive chassis have really done the math on the maximum power loading for mechanical hard drives that's really the only rough spot you could run into some disc shelves weren't designed for the power load of SATA discs that need as much power as they do but generally those disc shelves were designed with like 10K SAS drives in mind which use a lot more power than these so it's probably fine even if you're putting these in in an older enclosure if you are doing something like planning to build a server around old Enterprise gear I would definitely recommend that you go with the SAS version of the drive not SATA for a whole host of reasons none of which are to do with the fact that this shows up as one volume and you'll have to manage with LBA sector mapping or the script that we have a level one forums it's just that SAS and Enterprise gear is generally a little uh more robust but the SATA version works just fine in desktop computers desktop class nases like the SAS version generally doesn't work in in a sonology Nas unless you have one of the Enterprise tenology nases which is designed for SAS storage as opposed to SATA but you can still use dual actuator drives in your SATA enclosure if you really don't want to mess with getting the absolute maximum performance out of dual actuator drives they are Plug and Play you can plug and play into a desktop Nas you just won't get the performance benefit the drive will still run at half speed basically but if you're willing to hop into the command line do some partitioning do some some setup from the command line you can set these up so that they'll run at effectively 2x speed in your regular old desktop Nas this true for Asus store as well Asus store is a little closer to a stock Linux configuration and so setting these up for use in Asus store is also pretty straightforward there's a guide for that on the level one Forum but dual actuator hard drives if you're picking up a mechanical hard drive in 2023 and it's not dual actuator just let me put it another way double the performance of a mechanical hard drive double double performance mechanical hard drive it's you'll be able to read in the entire disc in less than 24 hours because it's 18 terabytes you know double the speed cuz when we're talking about 18 terabytes 250 megabytes per second it's going to take a lot of seconds to read in 18 trillion bytes I'm just saying I'm one this level one signing out and you can find me playing with more dual actuator hardops all right I'll see you later18 terabytes Mach 2 the exos 2x18 Dual actuator it sure looks like mechanical hard drives are going to be with us for the foreseeable future but what if you could double the performance of a mechanical hard drive that's what dual actuator drives do dual actuator drives are a long overdue technology this is a SATA version of a dual actuator hard drive and 18 terabytes 18 terabytes is sort of the floor we're going to see capacities go even Beyond this this is actually a recertified Drive I bought these worked so well from seate they sent me some SAS versions of of these to review that uh I decided to buy the SATA version as well because everybody was really excited and then seate sent me some more dual actuator drives so I actually have a bunch of these we're going to take a look cuz using the SATA version of the drive is a little bit more interesting and a little different than the SAS version this actually just shows up as one drive unlike the SATA version uh for for those of you not in the know you're like what the drive shows up as two drives if you have a SAS version of the drive that's actually really handy because then you can deal with the fact that you've got two actuators two physical drives and one drive you can handle that however you want in software but for SATA drives SATA doesn't have that option so these drives uh deal with that a little bit more cleverly let's discuss okay so this shows up as one giant 18 tbte hard drive but if you create two partitions you can access the partitions independently yeah that's what I'm showing you here on crystal dis Mark we're running two Crystal dis Mark routines on this disc on one single disc and yet each one of these routines is able to retrieve 250 megabytes per second from each half of the disc to make sure that you understand this there's two sets of read r heads on two sets of platters inside the drive it's not like two sets of read RADS can read all of the platters the drives and the platters go together so you have a front half of the drive partition and a back half of the drive partition and each half of the drive is basically independent so you create two partitions and then if you create a raid zero of those two partitions you'll get double the performance turns out this is really easy to do on Native Linux we've got a shell script on the Forum if you're setting up say Linux MD you can use Linux MD or lvm and tell it hey these are uh dual actuator hard drives here is the geometry layout of the drive and it'll figure it out and then you're off to the races the really exciting thing about that as a practical matter is if you have if you have a Nas or network storage it takes just three of these drives to saturate a 10 gabit ethernet connection yeah so if you're doing something like with the sonology ds1618 plus that's got the new faster uh drive in it you're going to have to go to the command line on the sonology to set this up the sonology goey does not yet support this but I've got the full walkthrough on the level one forums you just need to make sure that the uh redundancy partitions are both on the same physical drive so that you can replace a drive uh most anology Nas have at least four Bays so you can just add like if you have a failure you just add a drive into the fourth Bay and let it finish resynchronizing and then you can pull the drive that you think died and then that if you make a mistake it it doesn't really matter but I'm getting ahead of myself let's talk dual actuators having dual actuators as a practical matter means that the time that it takes to read all of the information off of this disc is cut in half it's half the time it also means that for seate certifying and testing these drives also takes less time half time is which is nice for them but the fact that we have a mechanical hard drive a single mechanical hard drive will now saturate its 6 gbit per second SATA link sata 3 6 gbit we've been stuck at that SATA speed forever and now you're telling me that we have a single drive that is going to saturate that SATA link I'm telling you yes another interesting note is that the Linux kernel as of I think 6.1 or 6.2 uh added special support for dual actuator drives it'll work if you have an older Linux kernel and a device based on an older Linux kernel but specifically what it does is it reserves space in the command Cube see with SATA drives you can send a bunch of commands to the drive and the commands will buffer on the drive but the drive might service those commands out of order if it sees a more efficient way to do that cuz we're waiting on mechanical Parts here what the change to the Linux kernel does is it reserves some space in the buffer so if you have a a workload that really heavily loads one side of the drive it leaves some buffer space in the command queue for the other side to try to keep both sides of the drive uh loaded the reason that you want to do that is because if the buffer were completely filled for one side of the drive the other side of the drive would be idle and farther down the queue in terms of what's queued on the konel side as opposed to what's queued on the drive further down the queue there might have been something the colonel could send to the drive to make the other side busy while the first side was pegged so the fact that the colonel is now smart enough to say yeah those LBA sectors can be busy at the same time as these other LBA sectors it's nice to see those changes in the Linux kernel mechanical drives for bulk storage not really going anywhere it's also doubling in terms of iops if you're thinking you can deploy a dual actuator drive for your games Drive well media is probably a better choice or your Home Server storage Appliance bulk storage that kind of thing even the most gargantuan uh steam collection you're going to put you're going to want to put the games that you play on flash storage you could archive your saves or or do backups or something like that to Mechanical storage but there's still enough of a performance difference for random IO that you'll want flash as opposed to Mechanical storage but the fact that you can get 18 TB dual actuator hard drives like this is a Precision mechanical instrument for way less than $400 I get these recertified drives for like $200 uh that's pretty amazing and the recertified drives still have over a one-year warranty I think that when I checked these online uh these still had 20 months of of warranty remaining of course the new drives have a much longer warranty because seate exos and the exos line is designed for reliability and and long term usage and the business use case the Enterprise use case so little bit more stringent in terms of quality control and everything else if you have something you want me to try with a dual actuator hard drive or a dual actuator configuration let me know I would be glad to do that for me I've been really enjoying the performance the fact that three of these drives can saturate 10 gbit ethernet means that I need to upgrade and have more machines on the 100 gbit segment of my network 10 gbit is too slow what a what what a time to be alive a mechanical hard drive a mechanical hard drive is able to seek and retrieve information at over a billion bytes per second we live in the future need more more all right I'm wi this level one this has been a look at the SATA version of the Dual actuator hard drives if this sort of interests you be sure to check out the other video that we did on the SAS version if you have a 45 drive storinator or other machine a Linux machine that you're looking to set up with these the SATA version of these drives do work just fine in those drives be aware that they do use a little bit more power the older version of these drives this is the second generation dual actuator the first generation dual actuator used quite a bit more power these use a little bit more power do be aware that some Drive chassis have really done the math on the maximum power loading for mechanical hard drives that's really the only rough spot you could run into some disc shelves weren't designed for the power load of SATA discs that need as much power as they do but generally those disc shelves were designed with like 10K SAS drives in mind which use a lot more power than these so it's probably fine even if you're putting these in in an older enclosure if you are doing something like planning to build a server around old Enterprise gear I would definitely recommend that you go with the SAS version of the drive not SATA for a whole host of reasons none of which are to do with the fact that this shows up as one volume and you'll have to manage with LBA sector mapping or the script that we have a level one forums it's just that SAS and Enterprise gear is generally a little uh more robust but the SATA version works just fine in desktop computers desktop class nases like the SAS version generally doesn't work in in a sonology Nas unless you have one of the Enterprise tenology nases which is designed for SAS storage as opposed to SATA but you can still use dual actuator drives in your SATA enclosure if you really don't want to mess with getting the absolute maximum performance out of dual actuator drives they are Plug and Play you can plug and play into a desktop Nas you just won't get the performance benefit the drive will still run at half speed basically but if you're willing to hop into the command line do some partitioning do some some setup from the command line you can set these up so that they'll run at effectively 2x speed in your regular old desktop Nas this true for Asus store as well Asus store is a little closer to a stock Linux configuration and so setting these up for use in Asus store is also pretty straightforward there's a guide for that on the level one Forum but dual actuator hard drives if you're picking up a mechanical hard drive in 2023 and it's not dual actuator just let me put it another way double the performance of a mechanical hard drive double double performance mechanical hard drive it's you'll be able to read in the entire disc in less than 24 hours because it's 18 terabytes you know double the speed cuz when we're talking about 18 terabytes 250 megabytes per second it's going to take a lot of seconds to read in 18 trillion bytes I'm just saying I'm one this level one signing out and you can find me playing with more dual actuator hardops all right I'll see you later\n"