back to article What's the first Kinetic Ethernet hard drive? Psst, it's the 4TB Terascale

The first direct-access-over-Ethernet Kinetic hard drive is a modified 4TB Seagate Terascale. The Terascale is a nearline 3.5in disk spinning at 5,900RPM. It swaps the SATA or SAS interface connections for two 1Gbps SGMII Ethernet ports to directly attach to the network. The drives repurpose the standard SAS HDD connector. A …

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  1. doronron

    So an enclosure is 2,400TB, say 20 isles of 20 enclosures, so nearly a million TB of data, or 1 exabyte.

    That's 1GB of data on each of 1 billion people, just for the NSA's Utah datacenter and there's 4 others.

    "Metadata only" my ass.

  2. Securitymoose

    Not really impressed

    With solid state drives increasing in capacity and reliability all the time, why are Seagate wasting their resources on this 'last century' technology? They will be putting a V8 in a Model T next.

    1. Patrick Moody

      Re: Not really impressed

      Apparently they wouldn't be the first:

      http://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/257047/260210.html

    2. Velv

      Re: Not really impressed

      Cost

      Pure and simple

      1. BristolBachelor Gold badge

        Re: Not really impressed

        "Cost

        Pure and simple"

        I'm not sure. If you take the example of the Utah data centre, and say you want 4 of those; is there enough flash in the marketplace to be able to actually buy enough to make them?

  3. jabuzz

    Rubbish stats from Seagate

    There are a number of 60 drives in 4U of space storage devices available from a range of vendors today that can be fitted with 4TB drives. As such this gives nothing extra in storage space, and given there is no form of RAID then the usable space offered by this system is worse than say a bunch of MD3660f/DCS3700 devices using dynamic disk pools.

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Rubbish stats from Seagate

      Seagate make the claim based on not losing rackspace to extra switches/servers required for traditional installations.

      They have a point but I'm not sure if it matters unless you're in ultra-large-capacity installattions.

  4. Ian Rogers

    cycles of the mind

    Instead of having all those cat5 cables in forest from these NAS boxes to the switch it would be great to have some kind of enclosure or tray with its own switch to slide the disks into and have just one or two network cables per tray.

    ...then perhaps aggregate the NIC and processor onto the tray and maybe add some kind of RAID logic

    ...of course that would require a faster processor but that's amortised over the disk bundle

    ...connect the disks to the tray with a fast interface that's already a standard perhaps and put the disks into caddies so you can hot-swap them

    ...add some memory too and a general api that's also already a standard

    Hmm, what did I just invent?

  5. Bill Neal

    Headline

    I saw the headline and thought, "WTF is Kinetic Ethernet?" that sounds dangerous.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Misread

    Misread that name as a 4TB Testicle.

    Now there's a new development in flash drives...

  7. Daniel von Asmuth
    Meh

    Wow, at 5900 RPM, we're gonna party like it's 1993 again.

  8. Greg Ess

    Great hype, 'cept the 'picture' of the alledged ground breaking drive still has a quite obvious SATA connector set.

    Fail.

    Oh, and Ian -- you didn't invent anything... but you did just describe a DDN storage array system....

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