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Data Storage Hardware

Western Digital Working On a 20,000 RPM Drive 194

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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Western Digital Working On a 20,000 RPM Drive

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  • by Leuf ( 918654 ) on Saturday August 16, 2008 @11:50PM (#24631723)
    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!
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by sunami ( 751539 )

      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.

    • by Firehed ( 942385 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:37AM (#24631981) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by davester666 ( 731373 )

        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.

      • I just balanced my beige box one oneof its corners and now it precesses like a top.

        It's a little tough to walk thru a doorway, and then turn a corner, since the computer wants to go at a right angle to the direction I'm turning.

    • by Fastball ( 91927 )

      When you play games do the bad guys sound like chipmunks?

  • immovable object? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seeker_1us ( 1203072 ) on Saturday August 16, 2008 @11:53PM (#24631741)
    I wonder if these really fast hard disks will have to be kept stationary. More specifically: I wonder if conservation of angular momentum (manifested, for example, in gyroscopic precession) becomes a real issue if any torques were put on a spinning disk.
    • Re:immovable object? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TechForensics ( 944258 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:58AM (#24632087) Homepage Journal

      The smaller diameter / mass will tend to reduce bad effects from conservation of angular momentum.

    • Re:immovable object? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @02:06AM (#24632371) Homepage Journal

      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.

    • Does anyone here know what a 2.5" hard disk actually weighs, so we can calculate the angular momentum? For example if we spin it at 20,000 RPM and a bearing seizes, will shattered fragments of disk penetrate the walls of the drive, the case of the computer, and the side of my head?
  • Solid State (Score:4, Interesting)

    by c0d3r ( 156687 ) on Saturday August 16, 2008 @11:55PM (#24631751) Homepage Journal

    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)

      by jay-be-em ( 664602 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:00AM (#24631761) Homepage

      Economics.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by c0d3r ( 156687 )

      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)

        by rootofevil ( 188401 )

        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

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by omfgnosis ( 963606 )

        It seems the long-term answer would be DRAM-based, with a battery to help mitigate corruption on power loss. Obviously older DRAM technology hasn't gone down in price/GB, but presumably that's due in part to production going down. I'd love a boot disk using old 100 MHz DRAM chips, if it could be made dependable and as affordable as flash drives.

        • Did you mean something like this [tomshardware.com]?
          • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

            by maynard ( 3337 )

            If you want to go RAMDISK, you're better off buying an 8 or 16 DIMM slot motherboard and installing 32GB or 64GB of physical RAM on the host itself. The the main system bus is far faster than pcie. Use LVM to snapshot and then backup your RAMdisks to physical disk at regular intervals. Put /usr, your SQL DBs, and any other dynamic data in RAM and enjoy just silly performance. Works great in combination with Xen.

            And don't forget your dual redundant power supplies and a good working UPS.

      • Price is about right with USD 3.50/GB

        Capacity: Already BitMicro has shown a 1.6TB SSD drive - capacity is only a problem as related to cost.

        Limited write cycles: At the rate they're improving, WTF cares? Get one much larger and faster for 1/10th the price in five years. Also this is much less an issue with 32/64/128GB disks than when you try to squeeze it all in on 4GB, a lot being OS files that change a lot. And solved in firmware on all current SSDs.

        Slower write speeds: The latest generation beat the crap

        • Actually, random data is important. Very, very important. Encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random noise. Anyone using TrueCrypt or similar will see a much larger performance decrease than they would on a normal drive, though the SSD may still be faster. It also won't write to random sectors, the wear-leveling algorithm does that.

          And since when is 3.50/GB about right? Thats about 3.5x what it would need to be for me to consider it. Normal HDDs have been under $1/GB for quite some time now.
          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Actually, random data is important. Very, very important. Encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random noise. Anyone using TrueCrypt or similar will see a much larger performance decrease than they would on a normal drive, though the SSD may still be faster

            Disk performance will be exactly the same, they are talking about random vs sequential access on disk not whether the data is random or not. Like, is the data written all in one place or on "random" locations all over the disk. Having a symmetric encryption layer inbetween will not change that.

            And since when is 3.50/GB about right?

            "Right" as in one of the things the wikipedia page has right. Which is why I said at the bottom that the one thing holding them back is price.

        • by TheLink ( 130905 )

          Write speeds aren't that great: http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106 [alternativ...rsion.info]

          It might be fine for desktop linux.

          But for other stuff, I think it needs a fair bit of testing first. For database servers, when say 10 users update a bunch of records, the writes don't usually end up conveniently going to the same area of the drive.

          And different databases handle stuff differently - some write directly to the table, some write first to a rollback segment, some write to a write log, and so on.

          You really don't want to

      • Higher vulnerability to certain types of effects, including abrupt power loss (especially DRAM based SSDs)

        That sounds odd. DRAM based SSDs are certainly vulnerable to that, but I would have thought that flash-based SSDs are almost completely immune to power loss (they need power to operate of course). HDDs, on the other hand are at risk of mechanical damage and/or failure from abrupt power loss.

    • Because so far, while some solid-state drives have very low latency, they have not yet been able to match the combination of bandwidth, capacity, and cost of a moving platter.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by eelke_klein ( 676038 )

      Maybe because western digital is a harddrive manufacturer, not a flash memory manufacturer. They do not have the know how to make flash chips they could buy them but it would be hard to compete against the manufacturers that bake their own flash memory.

    • by grumbel ( 592662 )

      Give it time, not to long ago flash was quite expensive and also rather slow and small on storage, its only recently that it has come into an area where it is really interesting has a harddrive replacement, it might take some more time till the price is down enough that it is actually interesting for the masses. I don't expect the spinning drives to disappears anytime soon, since they have still quite a leap in terms of storage, but a dual solution with solid state for the OS and a spinning one for the movi

  • by Ostsol ( 960323 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:00AM (#24631763)

    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.

    • by hedwards ( 940851 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:03AM (#24631789)

      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.

    • by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:24AM (#24631907) Homepage Journal

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The higher speed drives aren't so much for their sequential transfer rates by themselves, but their random seek rates.

        The secret goal is to use the drive as a flywheel, and power a laptop.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MeepMeep ( 111932 )

        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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

      • by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:41AM (#24632003)

        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.

      • Those are the maximum rotational latencies, not average. On average you will wait half a rotation and thus making the average rotational latency of a 15K rpm drive 2 ms.
      • To your point, something I've long wondered is why there seems to have been little to no interest to date in an array of heads per surface. Sweeping a single head across the entire surface surely takes twice as long as moving two heads half the distance. They could even share the same actuator by covering different, possibly partially overlapping, sections of disk area.

        How about a ladder structure with 8 heads that translate 1/8th the platter width instead of the whole thing? How about using opposing side
    • by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:10AM (#24632141) Homepage
      You can't just wave a magic wand and double the density. Many of these things are interrelated in a complex manner. Increased density requires new head designs, new and improved electronics, new coatings for the platters, etc.
    • by uncqual ( 836337 )
      Two Words - Rotational Latency (For random IO of course)
      • by thsths ( 31372 )

        > Two Words - Rotational Latency

        True, but why don't they use two read heads, one on each side of the drive? That seems a lot easier than going into rocket science material with 25000rpm. After all, at that speed centrifugal forces are over 5 times of the value at 10000 rpm.

    • by Trogre ( 513942 )

      Yes. Increasing your bit density to the nth power does nothing for your access times.

    • I think 20,000 RPM is ridiculous overkill for a desktop computer hard drive, especially with today's Serial ATA-300 interface. Wouldn't it be better with just a modest speed increase (from 7200 to 10,000 RPM) combined with a 32 MB on-drive memory cache and faster head seaks, which makes it much easier to keep down power consumption, heat generation and noise?

  • Add heads? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:01AM (#24631769) Homepage

    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)

      by vikstar ( 615372 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:11AM (#24631845) Journal

      Good idea. I for one would prefer to go solid state.

    • Re:Add heads? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BronsCon ( 927697 ) <social@bronstrup.com> on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:11AM (#24631847) Journal

      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?

      • Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ka9dgx ( 72702 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:26AM (#24631927) Homepage Journal
        I'd go even further... use the old 5 1/4 "half height" form factor, stack 8 platters in it, with 4 sets of heads, spin it at 5400 rpm to keep the power requirements down to reasonable.
        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--

        • Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by frieko ( 855745 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:01AM (#24632095)
          Modern hard drives can only read from one head at a time. The tracks are packed in such that thanks to uneven thermal expansion, only one track will be lined up under a head at any given time. But two sets of heads might work as gp suggested.
          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by ka9dgx ( 72702 )
            Each set of heads would have its own servo, so the small variations in distance due to expansion of the case wouldn't matter. I agree that reading from one head at a time is a limitation that has to be lived with, and always will be.
            • Re:Add heads? (Score:4, Informative)

              by ndevice ( 304743 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:52AM (#24632311)

              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.

      • Kenwood TrueX...? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RudeIota ( 1131331 )
        Remember those? It kind of reminds me of the multi-head idea you have. Perhaps one of the differences (I think) is that the actual head assembly moved too, to compensate for the disc itself not being able to rotate faster (discs have the potential to shatter above the usual max speeds on current optical drives). I remember seeing a drive rated at 72X back in early 2000.. maybe even 99.. I don't feel like digging up a link though.

        They were fast and quiet, but I don't think they make them anymore. I rememb
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by karnal ( 22275 )

          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.

        • by KGIII ( 973947 )

          When I first read the 20,000 RPM my first thought was that when these disks fail they'll bring new meaning to the phrase "catastrophic failure."

          CD-ROM Shattering - MythBusters Wiki: Discovery Channel:
          http://mythbusters-wiki.discovery.com/page/CD-ROM+Shattering?t=anon [discovery.com]

          It isn't the same thing, of course, but I wonder what the required RPM would be to make platters shatter.

    • Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gazzonyx ( 982402 ) <scott.lovenberg@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:14AM (#24631865)
      Well, that would add to the number of components that could fail, and require a high speed bus between the two controllers, as well as a shared cache and all the headaches that would bring with it (think SMP caches being ping-ponged). Then you've got to sync your interface to the system bus as well as the new internal buses. On the other hand, you can just crank the knob up to 11 and go 20K RPMs on known, tried and true, technology.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      CDC's hard drive division did this years ago. They were later acquired by Seagate. The drives were too expensive for the improvements in performance and were discontinued. It isn't only a set of heads, it's another positioner assembly and a large amount of duplicated electronics. That's more power, heat, PCB space.
    • Re:Add heads? (Score:5, Informative)

      by YesIAmAScript ( 886271 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:24AM (#24632199)

      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.

    • Even better: how about a strip of heads from a platters center to its perimeter (i.e. radius) --no moving read head! Taking into account that the density of the read heads would be insufficient for the number of tracks, simply stager the heads (my diagram [photobucket.com]). Surely this is feasible?!

      --
      C:\WINDOWS\system32\lusrmgr.exe
    • Access speed to what your looking for is where many make up for time. The problem with many heads is similar to many drives per controller. You end up over running the controller, bus, etc, with volume.

      Our file system (db2) is usually under the load of hundreds of SQL statements being processed at any second, selected columns and linked tables. The data isn't large, just a lot of it from a lot of different files. Plus IBM likes to abuse high speed drives with scatter loaded data... something is always b

  • ...wouldn't it be possible to multiply a hdds thoughput by adding multiple heads per platter? Actually come to think of it are all platters read/write in a RAID0 fashion?
    • The advantage to having faster RPMs isn't as much throughput as it is seek times. You can RAID 0 all the drives you want together, but you'll never improve the throughput. I'm sure this is in response to SSDs, which really have two huge advantages right now: seek time and reliability. Adding another 10,000 RPMs may help HDDs limp along in the performance arena a little while longer...

      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
      • The advantage to having faster RPMs isn't as much throughput as it is seek times.

        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.

      • I run two Raptors in RAID 0 with short stroked partitions. If you keep your partition slices to the outside of the drive, with variable data partitions (/var, /tmp (if you put that to HD instead of tmpfs), and swap) between static partitions (/usr, /usr/local), you can get much better performance than if you glob the whole thing on LVM. Oh, yeah, and write off the last 15% of the drive, the seek time to it doesn't justify the storage space since it's the slowest part of the drive. Use the kernels I/O ele
    • by Detritus ( 11846 )

      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.

      • "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."

        Except the car is a jumbo traveling at cruising speed, 6" above the road.
  • by ThatsNotFunny ( 775189 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:08AM (#24631825)
    Now it can lose my data twice as fast the last one I bought.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Gazzonyx ( 982402 )
      Yeah, it's the last time I'm going to buy one of those things... until the next sale... or if I need to pick one up at Wal*Mart at 3AM. I've been saying that for three years now. Somehow my drives die just in time for the newest WD's to be on sale.
      • by bigstrat2003 ( 1058574 ) * on Sunday August 17, 2008 @01:47AM (#24632279)

        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.

        • WD is pretty good, Seagate has also been kind to me (Kind enough I ran my OS off a Raid0 for 5 years o_0).

          But Fujitsu, those drives are CRAP, and they end up in laptops :(
        • Actually, I run my Linux desktop on RAID0 Raptors. As far as WD goes, my numbers are skewed from an obscure bug they had in their firmware on their **KS drives. I've got 4 AAKS' in my storage box at home, and 3 RE2 Y(D?)KS' on a rack at work.

          I've found that in reality the sheer number of WDs that I've got in boxes at any given moment. Their Raptors are in an entirely different league than their large capacity drives, though. I've got three of those (2 150 GB, and a 75GB) in boxes without a single hit
  • by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:16AM (#24631871) Journal

    The disk is stationary and we spin the case [freeola.com] for better cooling.

    • 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)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:19AM (#24631885) Homepage Journal

    the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times

    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)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 )

      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"

    • by ndevice ( 304743 )

      As pointed out in a previous comment, it's difficult to precisely address parallel tracks on different platters because of uneven thermal expansion in each of the platters. However, multi-bit perpendicular recording is a similar concept.

  • Just imagine how loud something like this will be. The Velociraptor is loud enough, in my opinion. And because of that, these drives will only have a place in environments where speed > noise (perhaps gaming systems).

    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.
    • Most hardware reviews agree with me - the Velociraptor is one of the quietest drives around.

      Maybe you're thinking of the old Raptor drives?

    • This will probably come out first as an enterprise drive on a SAS interface, like most of the 15000 RPM disks. Enterprises drives are loud, but you don't really care about this, since they are not supposed to be working in the same room as you are.
  • by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Sunday August 17, 2008 @12:48AM (#24632035)

    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:2, Informative)

      by wisty ( 1335733 )
      SSD has won most of the phone and iPod tier. Ultra-portables will go next. Then laptops, appliance desktops, gamer desktops, then finally business desktops. This might take 5 years. Only then will servers (which is the market for 20k disks) start to go SSD. 5 years is a long time.

      Google might find a use for SSD (using caching and stuff), but your average business running an Oracle database to keep track of their business information wants read-write (not read) performance, which is what these things can

    • I doubt it. SSDs are coming, but they're still too expensive and don't have the capacity. you can be ones between 2 and 16GB for somewhat cheap, but then look at what kind of capacity that will get you in a mechanical (Since this is a 2.5" drive, you'd be looking at about half the capacity of the current 3.5" velociraptor, so likely ~150GB, possibly more if they crank up the density.) and it's not really a competition outside of the seek times and shock resistance.

      Cheapest 64GB SSD (an OCZ one) i could fin

      • by jez9999 ( 618189 )

        People say economics are 'stopping' SSDs, but no, not really. Because I'm sure that 10-15 years ago, $4.45/GB would've been a fantastic price-capacity ratio; and they managed to sell hard drives then.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      When SSDs have large capacities (at least 500 GB) at a comparable price per GB, then I'll consider putting one in my computer. Not before.
    • SSD is still a bit of a slow transition because the price is high. Excluding select drives that are even more expensive, their alleged performance improvements are dubious.

      Notebook computers with SSDs are very few in number. because they are still bloody expensive. With a regular high capacity 250GB+ hard drive costing less than $100, who wants to pay $500 for a 64GB SSD? And those generally aren't even using the fast chips either, they aren't any faster unless you compare them to 1.8" hard drives, going

    • SSDs are still orders of magnitude more expensive.

    • absolute silence while working

      I've been thinking about this and I'm not sure it's an advantage, when I'm not doing anything on my computer and I close all the apps I know do periodic access it shouldn't do anything at all.

      If my HD makes noise I know I have malware...

      I'm not terribly paranoid about it but I like having a physical indicator that my system isn't being monitored or pwned.
  • Fame (Score:2, Informative)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )

    Who will be famous as the first consumer to die in a hard-drive failure?

  • linear speed (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A 2.5" platter at 20,000 RPM has a linear speed at its outer edge of 257 km/hr (160 miles/hr). Yeah, that's moving along at a pretty nice clip.

  • WD is dead and they don't know it.

    Flash drives are the future and will soon overcome hard drives. This is clearly a classic case of disruptive technology in the disk drive business. Flash can't beat HD's at the current computer buyer's desired capacity-price ratio but the speed and instant access performance is way better. Soon enough flash will reach higher densities and pass HD's in capacity-price. Hard drive's will go the way of the 3.5" floppy.

  • Maybe this is a "-1 Redundant", but Formula 1 engine designers have been able to make internal combustion engines that run at around 20K for a while now (granted with a lower MTBF, but considering the environment would a HD last longer? ;-) ) It seems like with the magnitudinal differences in scale/mass going down to a HD mechanism, they/someone should be able to get relatively higher (than F1) speeds at the spindle.

    I guess not tho, eh?

    -Matt

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by dfsmith ( 960400 )
      The moment you can show me an F1 engine that runs at 20kRPM for 5 years and costs less than $500 I'll get back to you.
  • Unless they add a daughterboard adjusting the position of the connectors, isn't this drive going to be a docking nightmare?

  • The next step would probably be hard drives that run in a hard vacuum. Current drives "fly" the head over the surface on an air cushion. A vacuum drive would have to actively measure and servo head height, which is quite feasible. Running in vacuum, drive speeds would no longer be limited by air friction and noise. Ultracentrifuges [gmi-inc.com] routinely reach speeds of 100,000 RPM.

    But such machinery would require developing a whole new technology, cost far more than a flash drive and wouldn't fit in anything lik

    • by cnettel ( 836611 )
      I wonder what level of power saving this would mean with somewhat affordable bearings. That's of course dependent on what level of sophistication would be needed for an active pumping solution to maintain the vacuum. Compared to an ultra-centrifuge, we have the big advantage of much smaller volume, and no foreign matter introduced... ever.
      • by Animats ( 122034 )

        It would be a cute technology to develop. Active pumping shouldn't be necessary; put the drive in a glass case, like a vacuum tube, bring out the connections through the glass using wires with the same coefficient of expansion of the glass, and pump it down once at the factory. Tubes hold vacuum for decades; so should this. The bearings aren't a major problem; active magnetic bearings are no more complex than a motor, and there's been some success with passive magnetic bearings. [jjap.ipap.jp] that work on the same pr

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