Software Developer’s Introduction to the HGST Ultrastar Archive Ha10 SMR Drives

In this paper we will discuss the new HGST Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives, Ultrastar Archive Ha10, which offers storage capacities of 10 TB and beyond. With their high-density storage capacities, these drives are well suited for large “active archive” applications. In an active archive application, the data is frequently read but seldom modified.

The SMR drives are host managed, meaning that the developer must manage the data storage on the drives. In this publication we introduce an open source library, libzbc, which was developed by the HGST team to assist developers who use SMR drives. The discussions cover topics from the very basics like opening a device, to more advanced topics like data padding. The goal of this paper is to give readers the necessary knowledge and tools to develop applications with libzbc.

We will present an example, and then report several benchmarks of I/O operations on the HGST SMR drives, and discuss the SMR drive’s effectiveness as an active archive solution.

Complete paper:
 HGST_Introduction_to_libzbc.pdf (361 KB)

Sample codes for Linux:
colfax_hgst_dev_intro.zip (1,002 KB)