Huawei may have used a very clever trick to make hard disks use less power — spin-on-demand disk drives may well compete with tape on performance, but at what cost?

www.techradar.com Huawei may have used a very clever trick to make hard disks use less power — spin-on-demand disk drives may well compete with tape on performance, but at what cost?

Huawei's OceanStor Arctic could use spun-down disks

Huawei may have used a very clever trick to make hard disks use less power — spin-on-demand disk drives may well compete with tape on performance, but at what cost?

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22 comments

Idk why nobody made it before. If you have 2 drives you usually only use the second HDD for data storage and sometimes games. This feature should have been there for years already (not as the default though cuz performance)
- We have. Spinning down disks not being accessed has been a thing for decades.
  But it's rarely used, because even if you the user aren't reading or writing files, all the background systems are still using the disk. And spinning up and down is more west and tear on a drive than constant spinning.
  
  Background systems using secondary drives for no obvious reason is suspicious behavior
  
  It's fairly standard behavior
  
  Standard ≠ good
  
  Completely irrelevant, nobody argued for or against that.
- I got a drive over 10 years ago that had some very aggressive power management by default. It would park the heads and spin down less than a minute after the last access. It was so bad that it would kill the drives within a couple of years if you didn't disable it. I found out about it a couple weeks after getting the drive and it already had more load/unload cycles than a disk that's been in normal use for years.
  
  It was a problem with early WD green drives IIRC. The power management was exceptionally aggressive and caused massive issues when put in to any RAID-like set up. You could override it though generally.
- Never glanced at Windows power options, eh?
  
  I don't use Windows much and I don't remember such feature
  
  Never configured udisks, eh?
  
  What is udisks? I've only heard of gdisk or whatever the name of that industry standard Linux partition manager thing is
  
  If only that comment contained a link explaining exactly what it is...
  
  Already answered this kind of question
  
  I saw the link. I asked that to show that I've never seen that program before
- it's definitely one of those obvious in retrospect things
  
  Could you explain what you mean?
  
  I mean that once the idea is demonstrated, it's not actually that complicated. But seems like nobody tried doing it until now. A lot of innovation seems very obvious in retrospect once somebody does it.
  
  Oh ok now I understand. I thought you meant that there was an obvious reason not to use this technology in the past. My English is really bad
  
  no worries

22 comments