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When it comes to cheap yet massive data storage, magnetic tape is still the favorite choice of data center managers. But its very slow read speed is not great if you need to retrieve data from it quickly. Huawei believes it has the perfect solution with its magnetic-electric drives, combining a large SSD, dual tape spools and drivers all in one handy drive.

China’s burgeoning data center market faces a problem in terms of long-term data storage. US Technology Export Restrictions have made it increasingly difficult to obtain disk and tape drives, so to ensure that the sector has access to reliable data storage solutions, Huawei has developed a rather ingenious hybrid system.

As reported Blocks and files (by ComputerBase), so-called magnetic-electric drives (MEDs) combine an SSD and a full storage system with tape drives in a single rack-mountable drive (instead of having separate tapes and drives as shown in from the top of this article).

Frequently accessed information, also known as hot data, remains the preserve of regular enterprise units, but Huawei’s development is aimed at managing hot and cold data – information that needs to be accessed only occasionally or kept only for archival purposes.

The way the setup works is that warm data is written to the SSD first and when it comes time to store it to tape, the information is restructured into a large sequential block, making it much faster to write. Although accessing any cold data will be as slow as tape drives have always been, any hot data requests will be handled via the SSD and therefore much faster.

Sounds nice, right? Well, I have a few concerns. While modern NAND flash memory cells are very reliable, this type of storage does not have the same lifespan as magnetic tape. That means there is a good chance that the MED will become junk long before a normal tape drive does because the internal SSD has failed.

One way to mitigate this is to use a huge SSD. The larger a NAND flash drive is, the longer it will last because each memory cell is written to and then left alone. Only after all cells have been written does the drive go and erase any cells to make room for new data. The more cells you have, the longer it will take to write them all.

I also wonder how the algorithm determines when hot data becomes classified as cold data and is loaded to tape. If it fails, the rest of the system will shut down while it waits for the “hot” data.

And when I mean wait, I’m not talking milliseconds or seconds – it can take several minutes for a tape to light up and get to the correct location before any data can be read from it.

Maximum storage

The best SSD for gaming: The best fast storage today.
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Still, needs must, as the Devil rules, or so they say, and Huawei is only doing this because it feels it has no choice. According to the Block and Files report, the first range of MEDs will arrive in 2025, with capacities up to 72 TB, with a power demand of only 10% of that required by equivalent disk drives.

Whether the technology ever catches on is another matter, and I’m sure many of you have had one SSHD on your old gaming PC. These were hybrid hard drives with a small amount of NAND flash to act as a cache to increase performance. They weren’t rubbish, but outside of synthetic benchmarks, the little SSD offers little in the way of a tangible boost.

I dare say Huawei’s MEDs are probably much better in this regard, but I doubt anyone outside of China will be able to get their hands on one. Too bad, because it would be fun to test one and compare it to a nifty gaming SSD for giggles.