Seagate Spins 15k RPM HDs 255
An anonymous reader sent us a story about Seagate spinning 15,000-rpm disk drive. This stuff spins faster then my head ;) I don't shop for hard drives very often... it kinda blew me away to see 40 gig IDE drives for only a few hundred bucks. I'm getting all nostalgic for the days of two 360k floppy drives. Weird.
Two 360s! (Score:1)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
Fast spin time is nice (Score:1)
Those were the days... (Score:1)
Re:Fast spin time is nice (Score:1)
"A 15-k spindle speed helps bring latency down to 2 milliseconds on the Cheetah X15, he explained, compared to 2.99 ms on the company's 10-k rpm class drives and 4.17 ms on its 7,200 rpm drives"
360k? 15,000rpm? (Score:2)
What are hard drive limitations? (Score:2)
EraseMe
Re:15 RPMs? (Score:3)
What Taco didn't mention, is that the platters are about four kilometers in diameter. So, 15 RPM looks pretty sweet.
Blood and veins (Score:3)
Re:Fast spin time is nice (Score:3)
Re:360k? 15,000rpm? (Score:1)
2 360k's and a Microphone (Score:2)
What is the access time on a Hard Disk like this? If it's not much faster than the current 7200 drives, i'll just hold out
-Tim
Damned technology! (Score:2)
Back many years ago, I started with a simple $15 NCR SCSI2 card and two or three 2g Seagate drives. That was great for a while, then I wanted more. After shopping around for quite a while, pretty much anything over 4g was Ultra-Wide. Ok, so I plunk down the money for an UW card and a couple 4.5g IBM drives. Now, I figure it's time to upgrade again, and guess what? Most all the 9g drives I see are Ultra2 Wide. I'm going to have to talk with Al Gore to stop inventing these new technologies so dang much!!
*sniff* they had 17K in the late 1950s (Score:5)
Dang thing took an hour to spin down and ten minutes to spin up.
--
Re:15 RPMs? (Score:1)
cheers,
-l
Luxury... (Score:2)
Mind you, it had a BASIC interpreter and a neat 6502 assembler in 16K of ROM, and would boot in less than two seconds.
They don't make them like they used to. Fortunately.
(Incidentally, I've still got it. Must see if I can get it to run NetBSD some time.)
seek: 3.9ms! (Score:2)
Now we're talking about a mere 18G drive, but I suspect that such speeds will probably be available on larger drives shortly. (I don't have any inside info on that, though.)
Re:360k? 15,000rpm? (Score:2)
I've been storing my jazz and classical MP3s on my LP hard drive. Of course, I had to get a way bigger case for my G3, but it's totally worth it.
Re:360k? 15,000rpm? (Score:1)
some work on replacing CDDA have much higher sampling rates. once the rate is high enough that you really REALLY can't tell (obviously Sony (or whoever) invented CDDA didn't do much tripping with the headphones on...) then you should maintain much more of the waveform like you get with a fresh-out-of-the-box LP.
on the other hand, i'll take a few pops or skips on an LP any day before a skipping CD.
$0.02USD,
-l
Moore's Law For Drive (Score:4)
and performance (data rate). It is easy to over state capacity of a drive technology as the manufacture can just add more disks to up the drives capacity. The real magic is increasing the areal density of the recording media. The cost of building a drive is basically fixed. Heads cost X, disks cost Y, etc. The inductry adopts the next generation technology when it becomes cost effective.
The business model of the drive business is crazy. It take 18 months to develop a drive and it has a market life of just 6 months. The manufacturers FLY the drives to the US using cargo 747s. Also the profit margins in the drive business are razor thin.
The drive have also evolved some very cool tech over the years. If you kill power on a drive the motor becomes a generater and powers the head into the landing zone. Today's drive include either a ARM7 or 16 bit DSP class processor. As long as you don't shock the drive (1/2 ich can kill a drive) it will last forever, unlike drives of old.
Scott
Re:2 360k's and a Microphone (Score:2)
Screw that. I want optical. (Score:1)
Finally... (Score:1)
Of course it's much easier to insert faster crystals into PCI cards than it is to make the jump from 7200 to 10,000 and now 15,000 RPM's... Sad thing is, i think all but one of my drives are 5400 RPMs... But next time i need one, i'll probably just buy on the high end again.
Nice! (Score:3)
The big question is how loud is this thing? I mean, the 10k drives i've experienced are pretty loud - loud when spinning and it sounds like someone knocking on the door when it's seeking... I can't imagine something even faster being any quieter.
--onyx
How Fast (Score:2)
Quantum makes 15k drives too (Score:2)
And damn does this thing fly!
Everybody who drools over cool new tech are going to love the storage options coming out in the next few years!
Later.
Those bastards (Score:1)
Re:Nice! (Score:2)
Earmuffs required. (Score:2)
I hate to be around one of those things without ear protection. Earlier this week, an old, slow, Barracuda crashed its heads on me, and I dropped in a 7.2K or 10K Hawk (forget which one) as a replacement. Man, that thing sounds like a jet engine when spinning up.
The story doesn't mention the Db of the 15K drive. The noise from high speed drives almost precludes them from being used on the desktop, if you keep your machine constantly on. Now that I need to get another drive, for a "semi-hot" standby replacement, I'll definitely be asking the ambient noise level before I get anything.
It's nice to see Seagate getting back into shape. Back in the ancient times (mid-80s), they were the undisputed king of hard drives. They almost bit the dust, but are now making some pretty good iron.
--
Ultra ATA 66 is pretty small thinking (Score:1)
Do we need this? (Score:1)
Re:Damned technology! (Score:2)
Since you're complaining about buying new scsi controllers, it's safe to assume you aren't planning to buy a drive capable of more than 40MBytes/sec. :)
How long until these hit the consumer market? (Score:2)
I wonder how long "trickle down technology" will take to get this to John Q Public? It is unfortunate that technology like this is never released on a broad basis. How long do we have to wait for someone to make something like this in a large scale? Whoever does so will quickly capture a substantial portion of market share if they can just make enough...
Fragmentation (Score:3)
At 15,000 RPM can a HDD case contains the pieces. Even if the chance was 1 in a million I would like to know if I should put some more steel casing around my drive bays.
A friend of mine has lost feeling in his foot from a flywheel in his RX7 breaking up, it broke through the bell housing, through the steel floor then through the carpet breaking his tibia. I know it is different but a piece of HDD platter could do some serious damage.
Annoying noises (Score:2)
Didn't need to read the whole article (Score:1)
Why read when I can just press (in netscape 4.x): Ctrl-F, "head",
and find nothing (but ahead... bad pun, sorry)
BTW: I did read it... there isn't too much to read. If you can't read that in 5 minutes, might I reccomend a speed reading course?
Sure, they say 3.9 ms access, and 2.9 ms, and 2.0 ms, that doesn't rule out a head that takes 1/10th second to travel from extremity to extremity... Maybe spindle rotation is the only major important thing in storing uncompressed live motion video, but what about fileserving - for that I don't much care about RPM, I care about full head seek time.
Noise would be important for me too - I like to listen to music while using my computer. Noisy hardrives make that difficult.
Old computer stories (Score:3)
Several years ago when I worked for the university, I helped throw out an old word processing system that my boss insisted was outdated (it wasn't broke, so why fix it?) It sported an old 10MB hard drive and if I remember right it was powered by a three phase motor [geocities.com]. I laugh when a person today says installing a hard drive is complicated. Today's drive weighs less than 100 pounds and doesn't require a special circuit breaker.
Makes me want to install my advanced MFM card and see how well those state of the art IBM drives will work with my 2.2.12 kernel. Does anyone still know what RLL means anymore?
Re:Ultra ATA 66 is pretty small thinking (Score:1)
Oh sure, (I apologize profusely for the following cliche) rain on my parade, why don't you?
Hey, I wonder how those, uh, watchamacallits... The 10 layer Discs with a 1gig throughput are going... Constellation 3D? Something like that. Now, if they got those into harddrive production (if it's possible, I doubt it)... Which reminds me, I need to go buy some of their stock.
Re:Blood and veins (Score:1)
Re:15 RPMs? (Score:2)
At that speed, the noise will be a fault line rupturing 0.25 Hertz!
Let's get those puppies spinning in sync so we can slow down the spin of the earth and put more hours in a day!
LP-ROM (Score:2)
These drives are for men, not for cowards! (Score:3)
No kidding, who do these whippersnappers think (Score:1)
Re:Screw that. I want optical. (Score:1)
--
Re:15 RPMs? (Score:3)
1: SCSI lets you do various EASY raid arrays.
2: The drives in a SCSI chain seek independantly of each other. The slave does not have to wait for the master.
3: More drives per buss and longer bus length.
4: Did I mention RAID already? Hot swappability rules. ten 10 GB disks beat four 25 GB's any day when you can pull a bad one out on the fly.
5: With multiple smaller disks, the data is not spread as far out on the platter, increasing seek times slightly.
I am no SCSI guru so I am sure there are more reasons!
Re:These drives are for men, not for cowards! (Score:1)
You could swallow one of their cute closing eyes and choke. I dunno how the eye would find its way into your mouth though.
Re: Does anyone still know what RLL means anymore? (Score:1)
RLL==RUN-LENGTH LIMITED
Source: the Maxtor Hard Disk Glossary [maxtor.com]
Re:Fragmentation (Score:3)
As far as fragmenting at high speeds, I experimented with that (for the danger of it...).
[Danger Will Robinson: Don't do this unless you enjoy being blind and hospital stays. If you are really stupid, you might die... You have been warned]
I opened up a (mostly broken) 24X cdrom. I faked it into thinking all the safeties were working fine, and got it spinning my old "abuse" shareware game CD up to full speed (ahh the irony). I closed my eyes (for some safety). I then took an exacto knife and quickly cut into the side of the disc. It shattered, and high velocity peices hit me. Fortunately not at all in the face, but they still hurt.
And that is ONLY a 24X CDROM (how fast is that in RPMs?).
The metal casing on a hard drive would likely be a good protection, so there is little to worry about unless you open it...
Limited space (Score:2)
Re:*sniff* they had 17K in the late 1950s (Score:1)
-Scott
Re:Nice! (Score:1)
Latency of the drive is not directly proportional to the RPM rate - you also have to take into account several other factors such as how many heads, the speed of those heads (how quickly it gets into position). RPMs != latency. That's a common misconception.
There's other factors to take into account such as the Internal Transfer Rate of the drive - how fast can that head move the data? You also need to take into account the delay (electrically, not physically) to "switch heads" - you can't have all those heads reading/writing at once b/c at it's core a harddrive is a SERIAL-based system. It processes one request, then the next, then the next. Yes, it sucks, but that's how it works.. and THAT has a bigger impact on latency than rotational delay.
Also, you mentioned that faster = noiser. No. Noise is caused by improper sound-proofing / vibration reduction. It's /that/ simple - anybody can cut their drive noise in half by putting a sock around it. I'm serious - take a sock and wrap it around your HDD. Make sure it doesn't come in direct contact with your case. Notice that whisper of noise now? Nice, isn't it? Be sure when you try this to leave the air hole on top CLEAR or you'll heat that thing up faster than an overclocked PIII without a heat sink.
Check out StorageReview (Score:2)
(seriously offtopic) (Score:1)
Sure was...
(Not that I don't like Linux, I use it all the time, but I decided to watch a DVD while I posted that...
Re:*sniff* they had 17K in the late 1950s (Score:2)
Although, I think RAMBUS still takes an hour to spin down and ten minutes to spin up...
What gets ~h~o~t~ (Score:4)
If the drive heads warmed up less than the platters, the differential expansion due to thermal changes would surely distort the spacing and change the character of the way the heads ride over the platter airflow. A difference in the temperature between the air and heads could also be a source of potential problems. I have doubts they specifically cool the heads. But perhaps they do have coolant running through everything, or maybe the outer frame.
The heat sources would be the electronics (mostly underneath, but some are inside, such as the head pre-amps), the platter motor, and the voice coil. The better the bearings are, the lower the resistance to spin, and the less energy required to maintain RPM. But at higher RPM, the resistance increases by some formula I have long forgotten, so there will still me more energy needed, and thus more heat dissipated, to maintain RPM. Lighter platters would also help, but I'm not sure just to what degree this is once the drive has spun up. Head seeking needs to be faster and faster to meet our demands and expectations, too, and that means more energy in the voice coil to increase the acceleration.
So, they will be very hot! But will the heads specifically need to be cooled? I doubt it. And running coolant out to the heads would likely weight them down a whole lot.
If only Yamaha made hard drives... (Score:2)
Heck, Honda hit 17,000 on their NSR500 a while ago. So, why can't hard drives spin faster than a 200-lb motorcycle engine?
Just food for thought. What's the design bottleneck?
Total Cost of Ownership (electricity)? (Score:1)
What the heck happened to drums, anyway? (Score:3)
Are discs just that much cheaper or smaller, or what? I mean, a drum wouldn't fit nicely in the drive slot, but they might come in handy for high-performance web servers.
I bet if you had some nice solid drum drives running at that speed, you could mount them in your car and use them as flywheels for regenerative braking and to hold the world's greatest portable mp3 collection.
Re:Didn't need to read the whole article (Score:2)
Re:MFM Drives with linux (Score:1)
FYI: This was with a Full length WD MFM card.
Fun - I remember the cool sound they make. And I still have them. And the very best - a broken one with a serious head problem - it won't stop violently moving it's heads back and forth. A 5 1/4" full height drive doing this means it will move off your desk in 2 or 3 minutes.
Nothing scares people more than when I say "hold this for a minunte" just before I power on that drive. Haha. Almost as fun as throwing charged capacitors at people (I must have been _real_ popular, huh? >:-)
Re:Fragmentation (Score:1)
I thought I was asking a valid question (it got a 2, Interesting). Do the HDD makers take the risk of fragmentation into account?
If you want to insult, don't be a coward.
Re:What are hard drive limitations? (Score:3)
Platter speed is not the only concern, of course. Bit density is just as important.
There is still a long way to go. It is possible to increase the current commercial storage density by at least another order of magnitude-- I'd have to look it up. Try IBM's website, they have recently read and written in laboratory tests densities of 35.5 Gigabits per square inch.
Other technologies include ferroelectric storage (using electric polarization instead of magnetization). This has, in theory, far greater storage density than magnetic storage because the walls of ferroelectric domains are typically thousands of times thinner than those of ferromagnetic domains.
Can't go on for ever. Speed limit is 75e9 RPM. (Score:3)
The calculation of the rotational speed that gives the maximum access speed is left as an exercise for the reader.
BTW... (Score:2)
Re:Fragmentation (Score:1)
Which drive did you open? I'd be interested to read the specs on it.
Wouldn't cardboard platters be likely to deform if you used them in a moist environment (must be why they pack them with silica gel).
All those I've opened are about 10X tougher than the computer they are are in (this follows with time - old cases were made of what seemed to be die cast iron, so the hard drive platters are very tough, almost impossible to bend. Today's plastimetal cases usually enclose a somewhat tough, difficult to bend, set of platters, IMHO. Although I haven't opened too many new HDDs lately.).
Oh, and hey, no need to insult (>youre an idiot). And if you feel the need to, try and make sure you post using proper capitalization and punctuation. No need to flame me for it, I'm not trying to flame you.
10,000rpm disks - 27mB/sec [Was: Re:Finally...] (Score:1)
I have a Seagate 10,000rpm disk [seagate.com] that pulls 27mB/sec easily on the bonnie test. And that's with a tagged queue depth of only 8 on a UW controller. The drive supports LVD and much deeper queues, so I'm sure it can go even faster.
Sure, faster disks are going to be nice. But they're going to be pretty demanding on the bus. If a 15,000rpm disk is even 50% faster than a 10,000rpm disk, there's not room for many neighbors on a LVD bus. Forget UW SCSI - it'd be a bottleneck with even one of these disks. Looks like it's finally time to break out the fiber...
But if Al Gore stops inventing new technology... (Score:1)
Re:Total Cost of Ownership (electricity)? (Score:2)
5VDC@0.41A
12VDC@0.21A
So that would less than 5W. A faster drive would probably take more juice, but even four times as much (20W) would only cost you $17.52 a year assuming 10 cents per kilowatt hour.
15,000 RPM Death... (Score:2)
-- Moondog
15 RPM? (Score:1)
Oh, and it's "Weird".
Re:Total Cost of Ownership (electricity)? (Score:1)
Not even as much power as a flourescet light bulb.
Read these links for the info:
(10K RPM DRIVES): http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/ent
(15K RPM DRIVES): http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/ent
Re:Nice! (Score:1)
Why should there be a correlation between spin rate and head movement noise?
---
VOLVO (Score:2)
I've got a stock '89 Volvo 240.
The engine has never been rebuilt, and pretty much the only work done on it is the standard every 10k maintence.
My computer is worth more than it is (but the car does a good job carrying my computer to lan parties). I don't think that i'll be putting a turbo in it anytime soon.
-Tim
Yes. This is a tank.
Take out the magnets (Score:2)
If you're gonna open up a hard drive, you might as well take out the NIB magnets. NIB magnets are the most powerful permanent magnets known, and they are used in hard drives. You can do all kinds of neat things with them. They are so powerful, that you can build a compass just by setting one of these magnets on smooth surface, such as a plate. They will overcome the surface friction and point north-south! Also try dropping a NIB magnet between 2 closely spaced big aluminum CPU heat sinks. They induced eddy currents will cause the magnet to descend rather slowly.
Have fun!
Re:Fragmentation (Score:2)
Circumfrence of a 3" diameter platter is 3*PI or 9.42"-ish. If this is spinning at 30,000rpm (just for fun :) the outer edge is moving at 282743ish inches per minute. This is a useless unit of measure so let's convert it to feet per second - divide by 12 and then by 60. 392 feet per second.
I don't know off hand how forward motion correlates to centrifugal force, but if it is 1:1, then those bits of metal are attempting to spin off the drive at 392 feet per second, that's 40G's. If the outer portion of the head weighs 1 oz (very much an overestimate) then it has to withstand 40oz of force. 2.5 lbs. Distributed evenly, a piece of aluminum foil could withstand that. :)
Now, if the head arm breaks off (don't laugh, I've seen it :), wedging one side of the platter against the drive casing, the other side of the platter is going to hit the other side of the case with 2.5lbs of force moving at 392 feet per second wedging it against the other side of the casing.
Platters (being flat plates) are stronger in tension than compression, they may not be able to handle what amounts to a well-hit baseball impacting them on-edge if the metal used in the disk run was suspect. It could crumple an extremely brittle platter, leaving it unable to handle any remaining tension forces.
Of course, if all of that energy from moving 2.5 lbs at 392 feet per second was used in crushing the platter, there wouldn't be any left to cause the platter to fly apart and puncture the drive casing.
I'm sure some of the math in that was off by an order of magnitute (I'm really not at all sure about the centrifugal forces involved), but if so, it's off in the direction of safety.
However, if a platter did disintegrate, it would sound really cool.. :)
I would be more concerned about the turbofan on your average airliner losing a 3' blade spinning around at 500mph to slice clean through the adjacent hydraulics line causing the plane to catch fire and the pilot to lose control seconds before landing causing it to crash into the airfield.
Oh, wait, that's already happened [panix.com].
Re:15 RPMs? (Score:3)
Not all HDDs are created equal. IBMs Deskstar 7200 RPM:ers are less noisy than most 5400 RPM:ers. And a 20+ GB drive costs about $200. Jikes! (Pun intended)
Re:Nice! (Score:2)
--
No core in the SS90 (Score:2)
--
I think 25 bands (Score:2)
I loved optimizing the instructions (one + one: 2 digit op code, 4 digit data address, 4 digit jump address (every instruction jumped)). You optimized it so as each instruction finished, the next instruction was coming up under the heads, and the data was right there too. Not nearly as bad as it sounds, because you had bands to choose from. Sort of like a 25 way cache. For example, instruction at 205 referenced data at 410 and next instruction at 615. Total 10 words, 170 microseconds. If you know "Mel the Real Programmer", that was a drum machine.
--
Latency, Seek Time, all nice, but.... (Score:2)
Seagate's spin relies on latency (2 ms) and seek time (1.9 ms) and as usual, they don't tell us how they come up with those figures.
Even if those figures are correct, that still doesn't explain how Seagate's new 15-K rpm drives would be better.
Imagine now, you have a server, it's transaction-busy, and you need to have lots and lots of io.
Would you rely on ONE 15-K rpm hd, or would you rather have 2 or more slower-spinning drives, maybe several, connected to raid-5 array, so to spread out the io load?
Think of it, willya?
A drive that spins 15-K rpm spins twice as fast as a drive that spins at 7400 rpm, that means, a 15-K rpm drives will NEVER last as long as the other one which spins half as fast.
I would rather have a full array of 7400 rpm drives in raid5 configuration than rely on the faster spinning drives that may crash before its time, and that will certainly give me lots of headache. For crashed drives means lost data, and if my server is transaction-busy, lost data means lost income.
Furrthermore, the recent MTBF from all HD manufacturers are almost always bogus anyway. How I long for the old time where MTBF means just that, Mean Time Between Failures.
Re:LP-ROM (Score:2)
"Wierd". My 10K drive is fine. (Score:2)
I'd stay the hell away from these new 15K drives though until at least a couple of generations from now.
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
There's got to be a better way. (Score:2)
15000rpm -- say what? (Score:2)
I have a feeling that this new drive actually has a 14400rpm spindle speed -- especially since the article mentions "7,500-rpm drives". Is there actually such a thing as a 7500rpm drive, or is the author of the article just plain clueless?
If the new drives are in fact 14400rpm, and not 15000rpm, and Seagate has the gall to market them as 15000rpm, then we might actually have a nice juicy class action lawsuit on our hands. (But then again, look at the so-called "56kbps" modems...)
Re:What are hard drive limitations? (Score:2)
Walt
Re:What the heck happened to drums, anyway? (Score:3)
On a drum, there's a lot of mass at the outside, with a disc, only the outermost rim is moving as fast as the entire surface of the drum. At low RPM's , not a problem, a drum would optimize the read/write speed, but if you want low latency, you have to spin it fast.
Imagine a 5 inch diameter metal cylinder spinning at 15,000 rpm sitting on your desk? It'd make a mess if that came apart, or a bearing failed.
Running a linear voice-coil across the drum or multiple linear arrays of heads would be required to get track density up to disc track density.
Lesse.. 3 inch platter, spinning 15,000 Rev/minute, at the rim, thats 98 ft/sec, speed of sound is 1090 ft/sec, or 66MPH , so they could spin them faster by a bit...
And... a 3inch platter has 28 sq inch on a side, while a 3inch high,3inch diam drum has 84 sq inch, roughly the usable area of 2 platters, both sides...
Re:*sniff* they had 17K in the late 1950s (Score:2)
UNIVAC stayed with drums longer than any other vendor, but the FASTRAND was just too much. They bought a disk manufacturer (ISS) and went to disks. So the FASTRAND ended the drum era.
Re:If only Yamaha made hard drives... (Score:2)
yeah, but they are making cam's and the like out of titanium and pricier metals. The bottleneck is price and reliability.
Try pegging one of these engines at 17,000 rpm for several hours on end and you will be the owner of one expensive semi-solid chunk of metal.
Instead of comparing peak RPM with sustainable RPM, lets compare similar things. Look at a modern Formula 1 racing engine (i.e. an engine capable of sustaining high RPM for a "long" time). In a recent Car and Driver they do the math to look at acceleration and masses involved. The average piston weighs 14.9 ounces. These engines redline at about 18,000 RPM. If you work out all the math, at that RPM the piston accelerates from a dead stop to ~100 MPH in ~46mm. To top that it does this 600 times per second. All of this translates to 9000 pounds of force being exerted on the sysetem every 1/600th of a second. Want to be on the wrong end of that when it explodes?
Similarly Chrysler was designing an electric (?) race car a while back that stored extra energy in a flywheel. To protect the crew they had to encase the whole thing in several layers of Kevlar after one tore apart and caused some serious damage.
Anyway, point of all of this is, cost keeps us back. Note that these things all come from expensive racing programs and most don't last for more then a few hours w/o a rebuild anyway.
I'm sure with current technology we could build a hard drive that could "peak" at much higher rates, but that couldn't sustain them. Following the motorcycle example, these special bikes spin at a rate about twice that of a "normal" bike.
So what do you say... how about a hard drive that peaks at 30,000rpm... now that would be something
MIKEOCCentripetal force (Score:2)
Bandwidth (Score:2)
Has anyone ever worked out the bandwidth of one of these planes if you loaded up the drives with data before shipping. I guess the drives weigh 100g each, and a cargo 747 must be able to carry 100 tons, so thats approx 1 million drives (reality check, this is a pile 10m x 15m x 2m, should fit in easily), so a single flight carries about 18 PB (peta bytes, 10^15 bytes) of data. Say it can make one delivery every other day, that is about every 180000 seconds, so we get a bandwidth of 100GB/s, or 800 Gb/s -- who needs project Oxygen (320 Gb/s transocean cabling) anyway?
"Latency" do I hear someone ask? "Don't be small minded!" I say. Latency can be dealt with by proper caching strategies at a higher level of the protocol stack.
Steve Linton
PS a 100 000 ton cargo ship full of these things does even better.
Fast, faster, >c (Score:2)
----------------------------------------------
True-x drives have issues though. (Score:2)
When it's working, it's a very fast drive! Too bad it doesn't rip audio as fast as my Sony CDRW though.
Now perhaps there's a firmware update, I just haven't gotten around to checking yet...
Slower than a Bike (Score:2)
HH
long ago, for the usenet (Score:3)
Usenet used to rely on the arpanet backbone where available, but most sites got their feed through modems. Sending email (off arpanet) required knowing not only the destination address, but the path of every machine that the message would hop along the way (but this was easy if responding to a post; just send it back from whence it came). To email me from back east you would have sent to
something like
!lilcompanyvax!decvax1!decvax5!
gad, it's been a while; maybe I have that in the wrong direction,
and I don't remember the names of the machine, but I think that
was my final address. i
Oh, and of the 30 or so newsgroups at the time, it seems to me that two were devoted to finding paths to people. Basically, a lot of posts like, "Does anyone have a path to George Jones at Olivetti in Cupertino?" If George knew your were looking for him, he would read those newsgroups until he found your message (or grep the newsspool
Anyway, I was saying that most sites got it through modem. Then there
were the sites that didn't, which got it by tape (Australia?), leading
to the observation,
"Never underestimate the bandwith of a [station wagon|747] full of
nine track tapes."
or something like that.
/end{reminisce}
pondering independent heads on platters (Score:2)
Density has gotten high, but if you want to hit two or three drives at once (swap, usr, tmp, home), you still need multiple drives. What about building a drive for which the groups of platters were separately accessible for different blocks of heads? You might even make it configurable--three groups of head-steppers, and a platter could attach it's heads to any of them?
This clearly wouldn't be a solution for servers, but it would seem to offer some huge benefits for workstations.
I want to party with this man! (Score:2)
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73G: still waiting. Press release predates reality (Score:2)
We're still waiting...deeply buried in their Web site (or maybe not) is a quiet mention that the drives are expected out Q1 or Q2 of 2000.
So, it's nice to see the advance to 15KRPM, but this doesn't mean you'll be able to buy one anytime soon! Seagate seems to savor the big announcement about new tech waaaayyyy in advance of when you will actually be able to buy it.
Re:LP-ROM (Score:2)
Although I never used it, I know people that did. (I didn't have a computer then, I just read about them and dreamed about the cool stuff from Imsai, Altair, The Digital Group (the coolest looking computers), Compucolor (wow, color graphics!), and SW Technical Products (possibly history's ugliest terminal.))
Back then there was something called the "Kansas City Standard" which was a big deal at the time because it brought interoperability to audio cassette tape data storage. The folks who did Flexi-LPs like these just pressed the KC Std. audio onto the disc, then all you needed was the correct adapter to plug the audio output from the turntable (well, a pre-amp, actually, since you didn't get line-level output from most turntables) to the KC interface box that you would normally plug into the cassette player.
It wasn't fast, but it was pretty robust: there was enough slop in the spec that you could usually read copies of copies of copies of tapes. (We're not talking quality copies here, folks, just hooking together whatever two cassette decks you could find.)
Wow, I sound a lot older than 37, don't I?
Re:Luxury... (Score:2)
Needless to say, fixing boot problems on this machine was a nightmare. You would come in at midnight, bring the machine down, and have time for less then a dozen boot attempts in an 8 hour window before you had to have it working the next morning. That damn machine took years off our lives.
Re:Fast spin time is nice (Score:2)
Re:pondering independent heads on platters (Score:2)