[mike_d]

I seem to recall an announcement from Western Digital(?) years ago about a line of hard drives with a direct ethernet interface. Does anyone remember the same or what might have come of it?

The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that make hard drives talk to networks, but nobody seems to be directly addressing the problem of we just want storage network accessible.

[gorkish]

> The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that make hard drives talk to networks

It's my experience that these boxes try to do a hell of a lot more than just putting drives-on-network and that is why they all suck and are expensive.

The NVMe-oF fabric devices out there all seem to command a ridiculous premium when the reality is they ought to be very simple and easily cost-optimized.

[matja]

There was a line of products called EtherDrive made by Coraid in the early 2000's that was basically a SATA to ATAoE bridge on the most basic devices, up to rack-mount solutions that used a Linux OS and Dell HBA to run vblade (https://github.com/OpenAoE/vblade) to expose a Linux MD array carved up using LVM2.

ATAoE ("aoe" in the Linux kernel) is nice because it is very lightweight in both terms of code to implement it (~2-3kloc, basically just stuff an ATA packet in an ethernet frame), low network overhead, and ease to setup (no IP addresses).

[wkennington]

Seagate kinetic

https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/hd...

[justsomehnguy]

> Does anyone remember the same or what might have come of it?

Nothing, because it makes each disk quite costly and by the 2014 nobody wanted costly and slow HDDs.

Check the Seagate offering up there it has 1Gbit interface. You can't even run the drive at full sequential read/write speed over it. And having a two 10Gbit ports on each drive would require having two 10Gbit switches, which by 2014 were still quite costly.

EM6 solution[0,1] is neat but at least it both the quite packed both by the spec and the price but delivers a lot of IOPS and throughput.

[0] https://www.ingrasys.com/assets/files/Datasheet_ES2000_20211... [1] https://www.servethehome.com/ethernet-ssds-hands-on-with-the...

[_zoltan_]

Kioxia has a line of products (EM6) that has an embedded Marvell NVMeoF/{TCP,RDMA} controller and Foxconn has a chassis that can take them and expose them just directly on the network. neat stuff.

[gorkish]

Neat if you can stomach paying for the novelty. Let's see an open product that does the same for any old M.2 stick

[_zoltan_]

SPDK + RDMA works just fine :)

[gorkish]

Yeah i know the software exists; it's finding ways to actually build systems from it that sucks. 2.5 gigabit ethernet has absolutely killed dead all momentum for getting faster interfaces in consumer hardware and SBCs unfortunately. I don't want to build a 2-drive OSD using a comparatively gargantuan microATX motherboard.

[toast0]

> The market is saturated with solutions for middle-boxes that make hard drives talk to networks, but nobody seems to be directly addressing the problem of we just want storage network accessible.

Most hard drives run a serial console on some of the jumpers. You can easily run PPP or SLIP over that. QED :P

[ronsor]

Nothing like those blazing fast 115kbps read/write speeds.

[csdvrx]

Tell me more, like a brand and model where I can do that!

BTW if you already explored that, would you know how to alter the SLC/MLC ratio by any chance?

Modern QLC drive often have a SLC area for buffering. With the right firmware tools, it should be possible to take a 4 TB QLC drive and convert it to a 1 SLC drive to get more performance.

[EvanAnderson]

An older reference for hacking hard disk drives: https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack

There were some firmware bugs on Seagate Barracuda SATA drives that could be worked-around w/ serial console. I don't remember the specifics though.

If you some search-engining on hard drive manufacturers and "serial console" you'll find indexed pages. (Presumably the really interesting stuff is buried deep down in forum posts, etc.) Just doing a couple quick searches got me some stuff.

[wmf]

I don't think the economics of this work because an Ethernet network is probably much more expensive than SAS and network configuration is more complex (you could make it zeroconf but that's also zero security).

[mschuster91]

> I don't think the economics of this work because an Ethernet network is probably much more expensive than SAS

Well, iSCSI has been around for ages, and because people got fed up with Fibre Channel requiring dedicated switches and transceiver components, first came FCoE that allowed using regular network transceivers and switches and then FCIP/iFCP that added regular IP routing to the mix but never saw much uptake.

[justinclift]

> first came FCoE that allowed using regular network [stuff]

From rough memory, didn't FCoE start out that way only in theory?

With the reality that people needed to buy FCoE rated equipment, which was priced at "enterprise pricing" levels.

Pretty sure that was FCoE, and I'm not mis-remembering that from something else... :)

[cyberge99]

I believe you are talking about the WD EX2 boxes. NAS in a box.