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Western Digital Working On a 20,000 RPM Drive
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Aug 16, 2008 10:36 PM
from the positively-supersonic dept.
from the positively-supersonic dept.
MrKaos writes "Western Digital seems to be preparing for the onslaught of solid-state drives set to impact its market by developing a 20,000 rpm hard drive. Similar to the VelociRaptor line of drives, the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times." This report out of Taipei is the only word on the rumored WD 20K drive. It's said to be a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" enclosure, for efficiency of cooling — the arrangement the Register enjoyed poking fun at when the 10K drive was upgraded last month.
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Seagate responds (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We've taken the next step by mounting our 15,000 rpm drives in an external enclosure which then spins the drive at a further 10,000 rpms, for a total system speed of 25,000 rpms. Initial benchmarks are very promising!
Pretty sure this is a general relativity question, so it would be less than 25,000. Come on get your science right.
Re:Seagate responds (Score:5, Informative)
You don't get +5 Funny for "getting your science right".
Parent
Re:Seagate responds (Score:5, Funny)
Before now, nobody understood why I have all of my computers sitting on top of turntables. Now I'll just point them to your post, since they couldn't fathom what I meant when I said it makes it run faster.
I had also tried mounting them in a paint can shaker to get at least another 15Hz out of the CPU, but I couldn't stand the noise.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I find putting my computers on a treadmill makes them run even faster than on a turntable. As a bonus, treadmills are much sturdier than turntables, so they last much longer before they need repair.
I also have stopped getting dizzy trying to look at the pulsing light on my MacBook Pro to see if it's sleeping or not since switching to a treadmill.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
http://funroll-loops.info/ [funroll-loops.info]
Paint flames on it, install Gentoo, and use --omg-optimized
immovable object? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:immovable object? (Score:5, Informative)
The smaller diameter / mass will tend to reduce bad effects from conservation of angular momentum.
Parent
Re:immovable object? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even though they are intended to be used in server hardware where they are going to be kept stationary you will also be able to find users that are going to use them in their home computers or in servers that are on the move.
This means that the gyro effects are worth to consider. Also considering my experience from WD disks I'm not sure that I would want to use them for anything reliable.
For a solution where speed is important but the data itself can be re-created or of less critical value they can be OK.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, well, giant fighting robots need enterprise-grade hardware too.
Solid State (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering why they are still going in this direction, as hard drives are the slowest part of a computer. Why hasn't a solid state / flash ram approach taken over? Is it feasible to have a hybrid solid state/mechanical solution?
Re:Solid State (Score:5, Insightful)
Economics.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive [wikipedia.org] answers my questions:
Price - as of mid-2008, flash memory prices are still considerably more costly per gigabyte than are comparable conventional hard drives: around USD 3.50 per GB[10] compared to typically less than USD 0.40 for mechanical drives.[11]
Capacity - although currently far lower than that of conventional hard drives, SSD capacity is predicted to increase rapidly, with experimental drives of up to 1 TB in test.[12][13]
Higher vulnerability
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
that bit about power consumption was partially recanted by Toms.
apparently they didnt do their homework well enough. [tomshardware.com]
color me surprised.
not to mention the article basically says that current drives have almost no power saving features and performance was on par to resulting in slightly more consumption, whereas platter drives have had decades to develop power saving features.
i expect this 'result' to be completely wrong in the next couple product cycles. the intel 'mass market' drives already advertise sign
Is there a point to this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there still really a point to huge RPMs? As data density increases, speed should increase naturally. Move over the same distance at the same speed on a drive with twice the density should mean that one has read twice the data in the same amount of time -- therefore reading speed is twice as fast, right? This should even work on low-capacity drives by simply using small, high-data-density disks.
Re:Is there a point to this? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not right, that's assuming that the writes are being done sequentially. Hard disks are random access devices, and while they can definitely do sequential reads and writes, and quite a bit faster, as soon as the files are not next to each other or are fragmented you're going to lose that advantage.
Parent
Re:Is there a point to this? (Score:5, Informative)
The higher speed drives aren't so much for their sequential transfer rates by themselves, but their random seek rates. They are trying to get high I/O per second rates (IOPS), which is what a lot of servers need to be at their peak.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is that going from 15k drives to 20k drives means going from roughly 150 IOPS to 200 IOPS.
That's it.
SSDs are getting 20,000 IOPS, and some specialized SSD and RAM systems like FusionIO and Violin memory are getting 120,000 to 1,000,000 IOPS (these are not typos)
Sure, SSDs are expensive but spinning disks are beginning to look more and more like an evolutionary dead end, at least for IOPS.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No matter how dense the data is, random access speeds are dominated by how long it takes to move the head to the data and how long it takes to wait for the data to rotate under the head. A smaller platter will mean it takes less time to move the head on average, but the only way to get the data under the head faster is to increase rotational speed.
A 7200 rpm drive has an average 8.3ms rotational latency; a 15k rpm drive is 4ms, and a 20k rpm drive is 3ms. In other words, this speed increase could enable the
Re:Is there a point to this? (Score:4, Funny)
In other words, this speed increase could enable the drive to do 10% more random I/Os per second.
We at the NSA are interested in things which are more random, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Parent
Re:Is there a point to this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Add heads? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems strange to continuously up the rotation speed, adding noise, vibration, heat and shortening the life of the drive. Why not just add another set of heads on the opposite side of the drive? You get many of the same benefits - increased sustained transfer rate, but also reduce the seek and latency. To maintain the form factor, reduce the size of the platters (use 2.5" drive platters in a 3.5" drive).
Re:Add heads? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good idea. I for one would prefer to go solid state.
Parent
Re:Add heads? (Score:4, Interesting)
I had this same idea, actually, only I thought to have 4 sets of heads, rather than just two.
I also thought of arranging what would essentially be two 2.5" disks in a 3.5" enclosure. These could either act as a stripe for faster, higher capacity data storage, or as mirrors of each other, providing redundancy at the cost of speed and capacity. If the drives in your RAID stripe are mirroring themselves, you needn't worry about mirroring your RAID stripe, no?
Parent
Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Insightful)
This would give you 8 platters * 2 sides * 400 Gbit/in^2 [wikipedia.org] * 50 in^2 (estimated working area surface area per platter) ==> 40 Terabytes in a single package, with an average access time on the order of 5 millisecond, and a sustainable transfer rate of at least 300 Megabytes/Second.
Even without the 4 sets of heads, that would still be a 40 Terabyte drive!
As far as RAID goes, it's just one drive, it's all or nothing, so don't think it would count as it's own mirror.
--Mike--
Parent
Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Add heads? (Score:4, Informative)
It's been done before, iirc, but they tend to be more expensive, and the multiple heads run the risk of creating unintended harmonics. Most of the time it would be cheaper and faster to use two drives with one set of heads, than one drive with two sets of heads.
Parent
Kenwood TrueX...? (Score:3, Interesting)
They were fast and quiet, but I don't think they make them anymore. I rememb
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From what I remember reading, they actually split the laser into several beams that could be read by a single assembly - that way if you were reading one long continuous file, it could effectively increase your read speed since it was reading 3 or more chunks at once.
Random access wouldn't benefit from this as much; for maximum speed you would need to be reading something that spanned the length of all 3 tracks (or more) at once. Writes would be even more interesting in this scenario.
Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Informative)
Connor actually did this right around the time 3.5" drives started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Peripherals#Performance_issues_and_the_.22Chinook.22_dual-actuator_drive [wikipedia.org]
It could read from either set of heads, but I believe could only write from one set. Writes can be posted in a write-behind buffer, so this didn't impact performance.
Parent
I always thought... (Score:2)
And the point would be...? (Score:2)
So really, RAID 0 helps if your data is read/written to sequentially, but in the real world, your data is all over the plac
Re: (Score:2)
If you have two sets of heads, on two separate arms, then you halve the seek time on average because each set is only responsible for half the radius of the disk.
Re: (Score:2)
No. Track densities are far too high for that to work. Each active head needs an independent servo channel and positioner. On a standard drive, only one head is active at a time.
With modern drives, you have to discard the model of the drive as a perfectly rigid and dimensionally stable mechanical device. Keeping a head positioned over a track is like driving a car at very high speed down a road that is constantly and unpredictably curving in one direction or another.
Western Digital? Oh good! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Western Digital? Oh good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad luck? I've never had a problem with WD, I swear by 'em. One of us is having unusual luck, and I'd prefer to think it's you. ;)
Maxtor, on the other hand... I lost count of how damned many Maxtor drives I've seen die. Single most failure-prone drive manufacturer I've come across. Everyone else, I see a dead drive here and there, nothing serious, but Maxtor is obscene.
Parent
We at Gnome Rotary Disks have a better solution (Score:3, Funny)
The disk is stationary and we spin the case [freeola.com] for better cooling.
Re: (Score:2)
and we at Underwear Gnomery Disks have an even far superior solution to that, putting read/write heads at each bit position on the platter. that way, the disk doesn't even have to spin. And then the disk could even be square or shaped like b00b135. Naysayers pointed out we had reinvented 1950s magnetic core storage, but we won't be waylaid on our trek to profit!!
More Parallelism (Score:4, Interesting)
How about if they make drives with very thin platters, but stack them up into individually addressable bit slices of the bytes they store? Then the time to read a single bit from the rotating media could read an entire byte, reassembled in the logic.
Or if the platters can't be that thin, how about sacrificing some storage capacity for say 2x2 platters, which could give 4x parallelism.
That parallel access might stave off competition from solid state drives for a couple extra years.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How about if they make drives with very thin platters,
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930 [theonion.com]
Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!
I was going to do a full rewrite of the article, but you can do it yourself by mentally substituting "hard drive" or "platter" for "blade," "razor," or "shave"
Noise? (Score:2)
It would appear to me that mechanical media is on its final throes before SSD totally pounces it. And if the Raptor line is is any indication of price, cost becomes less of an issue against SSDs.
I've got a Velociraptor and it's very quiet (Score:2)
Most hardware reviews agree with me - the Velociraptor is one of the quietest drives around.
Maybe you're thinking of the old Raptor drives?
The product will be dead on arrival (Score:3, Insightful)
I am afraid the 20,000 rpm drive might be dead on arrival! Isn't the world "going SSD," whose advantages include faster start-up times, low read latency times, "mechanical" reliability and absolute silence while working?
Laptops have SSDs, next will be desktops increasing chances that Western Digital's product will be dead on arrival.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Statistics? (Score:2)
It's my experience that they are all equally as awful as each other.
Re:They should work on a 20,001 RPM drive (Score:5, Funny)
20001: A Speed Odyssey.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Parent