Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet • Hacker News Board

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#21

Post by dsl » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 7:47 AM UTC

chmike wrote: post #14

I don't think this can be seen as a possible replacement for PC disk because of it's high latency. Beside unless you are very rich Ethernet is only 1Gbit/s. On the oher hand I see an opportunity as shared storage for mobile and ligthweight devices. Using a single and simple protocol, compared to NAS, could open a new technology domain and market. Of course it requires also a good integrated authentication and access…

Gigabit ethernet used to be ungodly expensive. Once 40G or 100G ethernet starts hitting production switches, 10G will start to become economical.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#22

Post by mcpherrinm » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:03 AM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #5

I wonder about performance - will this new storage protocol be at least as performant as current standards (ATA, SCSI) ? We need better performing drives, didn't the datacenter sort of already took care of itself?

That's an interesting question, and I think the answer isn't immediately obvious.

One important thing is that the disk is doing more work now -- you offload a bunch of what the filesystem has traditionally had to do onto the disk itself. That should mean less traffic, and lower latency. Maybe not higher throughput, though.

The interface is 2x1gigabit, so that's obviously slower than a 3-6 gigabit SAS or Sata interface. But maybe the offloaded work will be worth it? Especially if you are doing lots of "small" IO operations, the potential for lower latency might be a win.

It's a cost reduction at the end of the day, not a huge performance bonus. I am very interested to get my hands one and see how it plays out.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#23

Post by justincormack » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:09 AM UTC

dsl wrote: post #21

chmike wrote: post #14

I don't think this can be seen as a possible replacement for PC disk because of it's high latency. Beside unless you are very rich Ethernet is only 1Gbit/s. On the oher hand I see an opportunity as shared storage for mobile and ligthweight devices. Using a single and simple protocol, compared to NAS, could open a new technology domain and market. Of course it requires also a good integrated authentication and access…

Gigabit ethernet used to be ungodly expensive. Once 40G or 100G ethernet starts hitting production switches, 10G will start to become economical.

Anything over fibre or non standard cabling is likely to remain expensive for quite some time. 2.5Gb is about the limit of cheap alas for a long time.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#24

Post by agumonkey » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:21 AM UTC

justinsb wrote: post #20

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,…

hard drives are already run by arm controllers http://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/sprite_tm-ohm2013-talk-hackin...

so your idea might happen sooner than expected

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#25

Post by rurounijones » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:22 AM UTC

As a counterpoint: A slightly less gushing article with some good comments (yes, even on El Reg) http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/22/seagate_letting_apps...

Comments along the lines of "Backups? Snapshots? RAID? How they handling this then?"

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#26

Post by rythie » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:32 AM UTC

I don't understand why this is branded as a Ethernet protocol when it's a IP protocol

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#27

Post by oofabz » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:36 AM UTC

I hope it will support IPv6. The article mentions DHCP and has an example address of 1.2.3.4, but IPv4 seems like a poor choice for a new LAN protocol in 2013. Not everyone has IPv6 internet connectivity but we do all have IPv6 LAN.

Apple has been using IPv6 for local network services for years now, like file sharing and Time Capsule backups, and it works great.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#28

Post by mrb » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:45 AM UTC

I wish SD cards would implement a key-value storage interface natively. It would instantly remove the need to implement a filesystem in many embedded systems eg. music players: all they need is access to keys (song filenames) and values (blob of ogg/mp3 data).

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#29

Post by ordinary » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 8:45 AM UTC

justincormack wrote: post #23

dsl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gigabit ethernet used to be ungodly expensive. Once 40G or 100G ethernet starts hitting production switches, 10G will start to become economical.

Anything over fibre or non standard cabling is likely to remain expensive for quite some time. 2.5Gb is about the limit of cheap alas for a long time.

Fibre is not required to beat the 2.5Gb/s limit. Standard copper Cat 6a cables already support 10Gb/s for distances up to 100m.

Re: Seagate just reinvented the disk interface using Ethernet

#30

Post by Already__Taken » Fri, Oct 25, 2013, 9:00 AM UTC

Were going to have to have a low profile Ethernet connect then aren't we. If this takes over there's no way that plug can get put on our ever shrinking devices.