Western Digital To Offers 20 TB HDD with dual actuator that achieves twice the transfer speed

SAS, CMR and high capacity... let's combinate numerous HDD like this one with huge cache

 

would this be the last kicks of this tech?

 

These are simply two drives in one case and using the same spindle motor, aka 2x10 TB drives combined.

The "1.7 times faster" is not exactly correct, each internal actuator/logic is seen as one individual SAS drive, but you can Raid0 them just like you can Raid0 any two drives and obtain faster speeds, but that depends wildly on the Raid configuration used.

Their purpose is to extract more efficient use of space out of a limited number of drives in a slim server or NAS, for example, when you can only put 4 drives you're out of luck with Raid 6 (You can do it, but you're basically wasting 50% of the storage space and terrible performance). However, with 4x of these you get 8 "drives" and you can do 6+2 and only use 25% of the space for parity, and much better speed overall.

 

I wonder about the noise ?
my go to drives are the "WD" Ultrastar DC HC5xx
I write "WD" in quotes because those are really HGST drives which was Hitachi, western digital bought them but they are not made nor sound or age badly like the real WD the blue blacks greens reds
"HGST" have the lowest noise 10x better than the atrocious seagate ironwolf that sound like someone is machine grinding metal in there

will probably buy 1 to try then 3 more if they're any good

 

Hopefully not

 

I was looking for pictures of the interface on these drives to confirm this. All the pictures so far look like just the front label.

 

Noooo... next will be HAMR to reach 90To and more.
Despite big SSD evolution in volume size and lowering price, the HDD is still the only solution on high volume for pro (in hybrid and so the SAS / U2 )
SSD is, for now at 8T max for normal use and if you want one, it is still at the price of 8 HDD of 4T that you could raid for security,
(everything, SSD and HDD in pro version, we don't talk about Samsung 8T QLC )
Also SSD rentability point over HDD is at 2T / 4T depending brand, so if you need high volume you need to improve or change hardware too.
One day we will see the end of this but it take time.
A nice 8 disk raid with a big SSD caching, should be awesome for a medium size company.

 

There is only one interface, they have internal SAS expander chip.