Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware Hacking Data Storage

Advances in New Western Digital Drives 194

Posted by CmdrTaco from the holy-wars-and-hard-drives dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB hard drive has 300 MB/sec transfer rate the drive has a monster 16 MB cache, both of which should make it one of the best performing 7200 RPM drives on the market. WD categorizes this drive in the "Highest Performance" section of its desktop market, so its safe to assume that is has solid performance without the expense of an enterprise level drive. With products like this available, advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing, especially considering the price level of this drive."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Advances in New Western Digital Drives More

Advances in New Western Digital Drives

Comments Filter:

  • This is not new or special (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:20PM (#14108965)
    WD released this drive at least 3 months ago, and other drives with 16mb caches have been out even longer.

    This is just another useless [slashdot.org] anonymously submitted [slashdot.org] article by [slashdot.org] Sal Cangeloso [slashdot.org] that may [slashdot.org] in fact [slashdot.org] be a [slashdot.org] slashvertisement [slashdot.org]. Notice the price listing on the first page, unless of course you have your ads blocked [mozdev.org].

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:31PM (#14109038)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.

        According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1. Burst speed isn't my #1 consideration anyways, but it's something.

        More importantly, could two (or more) SATA1 drives on a SATA2 bus exceed 150 MB/s in total? I would think not, in which

        • According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1.

          Seeing how the overall data-rate off of the heads is only in the 60MByte/sec to 90MByte/sec range, all this talk of 300MByte channels is bordering on dishonesty with numbers. The burst rate sounds like it is simply the speed at which the on-board cache can be read at. That isn't going to a number that influences much other than artificial benchmarks.

          This article is just another article from an ever grow

        • HDDs have been able to burst 150+MB/s out of their on-board caches... but the actual heads-to/from-platter peak transfer rates are much less than 1Gbps (~100MB/s) even for the fastest drives. HDDs able to max out an SATA-1.5G link all alone are still many years away.

          3Gbps SATA is useful for storage subsystems, like SATA-attached RAID controllers - no need to waste a PCI(-E/X) slot to get decent performance anymore and it also leaves more PCI(-X) bandwidth available to other devices. Another purpose is SATA
        • could two (or more) SATA1 drives on a SATA2 bus exceed 150 MB/s in total? I would think not, in which case SATA2 is a big advantage if you want multiple drives on a bus.

          Well...... I'd vote against two drives on one bus. SATA is point to point. Max one drive per connection.

          So the article, and the WDC website claim 300MB per second transfer rate. That's THEORETICAL buffer-to-host. Apparently someone measured that at 170 Mbyte per second.

          Platter to buffer is an impressive 748 Mbit per second. That's an impress

        • Re:This is not new or special (Score:4, Informative)

          by Shanep ( 68243 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @09:02PM (#14110403) Homepage
          According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1. Burst speed isn't my #1 consideration anyways, but it's something.

          Drive quoted burst speed comes from or to on drive cache anyway. That cache is good to help the drive sustain it's highest read transfer rates through read-ahead (when the OS comes back for the next block, it has already been read from disk) and also an OS can send small writes to the drive faster. But in practice this mostly just helps a disk to meet it's highest sustained transfer rates. The burst speed sounds good and 16MB cache sounds good, but in these modern times, when we use OS' which use free memory as buffer/caches, we have a LOT of memory and that memory is REALLY FAST, on-drive caches are mostly being used as buffers. As far a caching goes, they don't really get used all that much, since re-reading a block will almost always come from system RAM before it comes from drive cache RAM. Sure it is true that the read-ahead caching on the drive is caching, but in practice it is mostly used as a buffer.

          Are there some other SCSI drives with higher performance now?

          From a practical point of view or from a meaningless burst speed point of view due to large on-drive caches and fast busses?

          I have a Fujitsu SCSI320 drive which sustains about 94MB/s at the beginning of the disk, which slowly tapers off to about 64MB/s at the end of the disk. That is faster than the raptor and this SCSI drive is also faster than the raptor in other aspects like read service times, I/O rates, etc.

          There have been Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi SCSI drives faster than the raptor for a long time. The Maxtor Atlas 15K II is really fast.

          In fact, as far as sustained reads and writes go, access times and sustained I/O, has SCSI EVER lost the top spot?
          • SCSI has always held the top spot.

            This IDE has a buffer to disk speed of 93.5 megs/sec. Interestingly enough, the article fails to mention what the CPU load is.

            For all important items, I use a SCSI, usually Ultra160 since U320 is still quite expensive. IDE is what I use for secondary storage since IDEs do chew up CPU cycles.

          • The burst speed sounds good and 16MB cache sounds good, but in these modern times, when we use OS' which use free memory as buffer/caches, we have a LOT of memory and that memory is REALLY FAST, on-drive caches are mostly being used as buffers.

            I've questioned the usefulness of hdd cache compared to OS main memory cache before on slashdot and gotten flamed. Unfortunately I've still never seen any benchmark that convinced me of whether large onboard cache really helps, or just helps results on benchmarks w

            • I've questioned the usefulness of hdd cache compared to OS main memory cache before on slashdot and gotten flamed. Unfortunately I've still never seen any benchmark that convinced me of whether large onboard cache really helps, or just helps results on benchmarks which intentionally avoid OS disk caching. If anybody has some hard info, post a link.

              I don't have a link at the moment with any hard info. But I did recently test re-reading a 1GB file in FreeBSD 6.0 Release on my AMD XP2800+ with 2GB DDR ram...

              ca
    • Wow.

      Clearly it's a slashvertisement, as all of the linked articles are
      • Terribly, terribly, terribly written
      • Incredibly abusive of readers, spreading the limited, technically vacuous horrific prose over a dozen pages

      If the Slashdot crew accepted those submissions without payment then they should commit hari kari now, because their use on this planet is done. If they did receive a kick-back - which I think is unquestionable - then I think this pretty effectively puts them on notice.

      Good catch.

      Remarkable that Sl

    • I thought Intel, AMD, ATI, nVidia and many others being sued by Microlinc over packet-based serial links for computer interconnects (a story from what I call the "dormant patent" department - wait for your stealth invention to become common practice then come out of hibernation to sue everybody for whatever they are worth) would be far more newsworthy... but that topic got rejected when I submitted it a few days ago and we get this instead.

  • Nice ad (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:21PM (#14108973)
    I wonder how do paying subscribers feel about seeing ads before everyone else!

  • YAPR (Score:5, Insightful)

    by legLess ( 127550 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:24PM (#14108998) Journal
    Yet Another Press Release. Nice to see that Taco's tight editorial control hasn't been impaired by too much turkey. The guys at XYZ Computing are giving each other high-fives right now.

  • Thank you (Score:5, Funny)

    by agrippa_cash ( 590103 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:24PM (#14109002) Homepage
    Thank you Slashdot, for bringing to my attention this exciting new service or product!

  • Advances that aren't being rivaled? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:25PM (#14109003)
    Is the poster serious? Hard drive performance is one of the slowest areas of advancement in PCs there is. Granted that there's legitimate reasons for that, but to say that because its got a bigger cache we're seeing advances not seen anywhere else is laughable.

    Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives. The amount of "advancement" in the video cards far outpaces the drives, except for the really big drives that can store weeks worth of pr0n at once.

    • Re:Advances that aren't being rivaled? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:35PM (#14109057)
      Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives.

      I'm trying, but really the VGA plug won't fit the IDE connector. I'm so confused...
    • Actually, hard drives have gotten faster thanks to the following:

      1. Common usage of 7200 rpm drives. With 7200 rpm speeds, data is written and read faster off the drive.

      2. 8 to 16 MB hard drive memory cache. With the memory cache that big many hard drive access operations are quite a bit faster.

      3. Faster interfaces. The arrival of ATA-100/133 IDE and Serial ATA interfaces have substantially increased data transfer rates in and out of the drive.

      I expect within the next few years we'll see the following:

      1. Ha
      • You missed the main driver of hard disk transfer speed: density increase.
      • 1. I don't expect to see that. As of right now the ONLY 10Krpm SATA drives I know of are WD's raptors, which have a small capacity, compared to 7200rpm drives. One might suggest that the Raptors are modified SCSI hard drives, where 10K is fairly common and 15K is not unknown. (Oh, and really expensive hard drives, are common.)

        2. Possibly, but that doesn't really matter that much. Either the drive is reading it, in which case you can expect to get maybe a maximum of 60MB/sec off a standard drive, or it's i

      • 8 to 16 MB hard drive memory cache. With the memory cache that big many hard drive access operations are quite a bit faster.

        Bah. I have 2GB of RAM. Most of it functions as disk cache. I'll be willing to bet that it gives me a lot more performance than the measly cache in the disk-drive. The cache in a hard drive is there simply because you need to store stuff before/after you transfer it across the SATA-bus. It can probably be calculated pretty precisely how much you need. Since this number is pretty sma

      • 2. 8 to 16 MB hard drive memory cache. With the memory cache that big many hard drive access operations are quite a bit faster.

        Actually, increasing on-drive cache sizes have shown to DECREASE access times.

        There was a classic example with a WD product which also came in a special edition with much larger cache. I think it was 2MB versus 8MB. Exact same drive, except the "special edition" had the larger cache... oh and slightly slower access times.

        Apparently this comes down to the management of larger on-driv
      • I'm not so sure that 7200rpm has a lot to do with it. The bigger issue for transfer rates is areal density (I think that's the term). If you can pass twice as many bits/sec under the drive heads at the same RPM, you end up with twice the transfer rate.

        A good example of this is to compare older, 40GB 7200rpm drives with newer 300GB 7200rpm drives. The 300GB drives are (probably) a higher density platter and should reflect a higher transfer rate.

        I doubt you will see 10k rpm drives in a 3.5" package (we
    • I don't see it this way. When I look back over all my computers from 1991 to now, hard drive performance and capacity seems to be the most obvious thing that has increased. Back then, 40MB drives were common, and it took a long time to read all that data. Now, I can read that much data off my hard drives in less than a second, and 400GB drives are becoming common--a 10,000x increase in capacity. Back in the old days, I really had to worry a lot about what I had stored on my HD, because the space was qui

      • CPU? Well, we now have 3.8GHz P4 processors (which perform about as well as much slower Athlons...), and while they're certainly much faster than my old 20MHz 286 in 1991, I really don't see much difference in regular desktop usage between my 3.6GHz P4 and my old 1GHz Duron from 3-4 years ago, or my 300MHz Celeron before that, unless I'm running transcode or something (i.e., not often).

        You don't see much improvement in regular desktop usage precisely because all the other components haven't had performanc

        • You don't see much improvement in regular desktop usage precisely because all the other components haven't had performance increases as much as the CPU. Memory is notoriously falling more and more behind. And many tasks are I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound, which means that speed increases in the CPU won't help unless the I/O bottlenecks get faster. One of those bottlenecks is in many cases still the HD.

          I'm not so sure about this.

          It's true that memory is falling more and more behind. While the bandwidth is
      • Network speeds? Nope. Back then, I had a 2400bps modem, and 9600bps was fairly common. Now, the most you can have is 56000bps (theoretical), only a 23x increase. Pathetic. Good thing we have broadband now, but that's an entirely different thing.

        Why is it an entirely different thing? My cable modem is still a modem, right? FYI it does contain a modulator and a demodulator, thus making it a modem. Or do you think the difference between analog phone lines and coax is that big? Or is it the difference between

        • No, they're entirely different things. Analog phone modems are limited by the available bandwidth on the public phone network, which is 64kbps (you do know that your phone conversations are digitally modulated at 64kbps and put onto T-1 lines, right?), not by any technical limitation in the modems or technology.

          10Mbps Ethernet existed back in the 80's. If phone companies wanted to (and there was a market for it), they could have installed 10Mbps ethernet to houses across America just like they have now wi
      • In 1991, I had a 200MB "Brand Technologies" IDE hard drive. When people at my college at the time were talking about what sorts of computers they had at home, they were sceptical to non-believing that I actually had a 200MB drive! Which from memory transfered data at about 600kbytes/sec. ; ) That drive only lasted about a year and I'd never heard of "Brand Technologies" ever again. Hmmm, maybe I should have bought that 105MB Seagate.

        I remember an Amiga 500 owner being amazed when I told him I had 4MB RAM.

  • Interesting Fact (Score:2, Interesting)

    by matr0x_x ( 919985 )
    A little known fact about the WD2500KS is that it has a sister WD2800KS due out in 4 months with double the storage and 35% higher performance. Of course the cost isgoing to be MUCH higher too

  • Anonymous Coward posts Slashvertisement (Score:4, Informative)

    by Yahweh Doesn't Exist ( 906833 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:25PM (#14109006)
    nothing to see here.

    desktop hard drives are quite possibly the most boring technology possible, except maybe non-wireless network cards. who cares?

  • Oh puhleeese (Score:5, Funny)

    by $RANDOMLUSER ( 804576 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:28PM (#14109021)
    A 3-platter 8.9mS seek-time 7200 RPM drive with a 16MB cache? You better use this puppy for video files, 'cause the only thing that's more tuned for sequential access is a tape drive.

    File this under "Ads that matter".

  • Big, Slow Drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jimmyhat3939 ( 931746 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:28PM (#14109023) Homepage
    Note to hard-drive manufacturers:

    Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.

    When will the 1TB hard drive come out? When oh when?
    --
    Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE [1800411save.com]

    • Re:Big, Slow Drives (Score:2, Insightful)

      by TubeSteak ( 669689 )
      While I agree with you that there's a market for such drives, the mfg's might be afraid that it'd canibalize their other sales.

      They sell plenty of whitebox 5400rpm drives to the major computer assemblers (dude, buy a dell) and its hard for them to get consumers to buy more HDs. I can't image why they'd want to offer a larger & cheaper alternative to their money making drives.
      • > They sell plenty of whitebox 5400rpm drives to the major computer assemblers (dude, buy a dell) and its hard for them to get consumers to buy more HDs.

        Are you sure about that? I bought one of the Fry's weekly special bargain-basement Linspire boxes for $159 a few weeks ago and even it came with a 7200rpm (40GB) drive. Dell and friends can't be too far behind...
    • No, you wouldn't really want a single expensive 1TB drive eggbasket -- what you'd want is a couple smaller drives to RAID together for redundancy plus performance higher than a single, big, slow drive could provide.

      The great thing about the monster capacity drives being released, though, is that the $/gigabyte sweetspot shifts up a notch. 500GB SATA drives are still > ~$0.70/GB, but the 250GB and 300GB drive sweetspots can be had for about ~$0.35/GB (or less if you do the rebate hassle).

      • No, you wouldn't really want a single expensive 1TB drive eggbasket -- what you'd want is a couple smaller drives to RAID together for redundancy plus performance higher than a single, big, slow drive could provide.
        Actually, yes, I would. I'd want eight of them to put into a raid 5 array. That's still only 7TB. You make the incorrect assumption that someone would only want 1TB total.
        • I'd want eight of them to put into a raid 5 array.

          No you wouldn't. You would want 2^n+1 drives in a raid5 array to maintain at least some performance.
      • No, you wouldn't really want a single expensive 1TB drive eggbasket -- what you'd want is a couple smaller drives to RAID together for redundancy plus performance higher than a single, big, slow drive could provide.

        Because a single drive would likely be cooler, quieter, and more energy efficient than a bunch of 7200RPM drives in a RAID array. As for backups, I would just buy a second one and a USB/FireWire case and use that.
    • Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.

      A *fast* drive is 15-20K RPM.

      Technology marches on and what used to be considdered fast is now slow.
    • Note to hard-drive manufacturers:

      Please come out with smaller (2.5") and faster (10krpm) desktop drives that don't cost a fortune (like laptop and enterprise 2.5" drives), and allow many fast, cool, and quiet drives in a SFF.

      When will the desktop market transition to 2.5"? When oh when?

  • Meta-Comments (Score:5, Funny)

    by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:29PM (#14109031) Journal
    1. I don't like the warranty
    2. I've had bad experiences with WD drives
    3. I've had great experiences with WD drives
    4. 250 GB isn't really 250 GB*
    5. This review isn't comparing similar drives
    6. My RAID array is faster
    7. RAID-0 isn't really redundant

    And my quick summary of the aritcle:
    $125 (50 cents per GB)
    SATA
    Not the fastest drive on the market

    *In this case, the formatted drive really does hold 250 GB

  • Slashvertisement. (Score:5, Funny)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:30PM (#14109033)
    Its getting more and more annoying...
    So this drive is great... says WD.
    So obviously is MUST be great.

    And i really like reading that it has a 16" monster cock... ^h^h^h^h^h^..^h 16Mbyte monster cache. You can really feel the journalistic integrity OOZING out between the letters. I mean, thats SOO great considering that currently my windows uses 360Mbyte as file cache, connected with 6.4Gbyte/s.

    And a 250Gbyte drive is SOOOO revolutionary. I mean, thats the smell of the future. Almost as if we were already in the 3rd millenium.... oh wait, we ARE there, and drives of this size have been around for 2.5years+ already.

    And Sata-2 transfer limits are SOOOO useful as a dazzling number when your drive barely reaches 70Mbyte on the outermost tracks for the first Gbyte.

  • the drive has crashed. I will no longer buy WD; crappy quality.
    • the drive has crashed. I will no longer buy WD; crappy quality.

      You know what's funny (well, sad): I've had my first encounter with a WD drive in 1994, and it died on me after slowly messing up all my files. I've dealt with other WD disks since (both consumer and enterprise), and they always turned out to be troublesome.

      1994, that's almost 12 years. Sheesh, I wonder how a company can spew out shite products for 12 years and still be alive...
      • It's naïve to assume that the relative reliabilty of each vendor's drives remain static compared with each other. The 'top dog' position rotates irregularly, as does the 'PoS' position. Currently, I'd say that Seagate are top for reliability, with WD close behind with their "special edition" models (and each is backed by 5 years and 3 years warranty, respectively). I'd say that, right now, anecdotally, Maxtor are in the 'PoS' position; everyone I know whose lost a drive recently was using a Maxtor. OTO
        • Actually, the quality depends mostly on where manufactuered and what techniques. For years, I would buy nothing but quantums (never lost one and some are still going 15 years later). IBMs were good (7 years on them), and now I am running Samsungs(4 years). Over the years, I have also bought a number of Seagates, Hitachi, Fujis, Maxtors, and WDs. All of these have died after several years. Every so often I have tried these and am disappointed. For now, I will stay with Samsungs.
        • Statistical manufacturing defects aside, I'd say the #1 reason for a failed drive is a cheap system. That 200$ PC uses a 7$ power supply and no fans except the CPU. Not all 300watt power supplies are created equal.

          These hard drives need juice and they need cooling. I have been a Maxtor nut forever because they run faster than any WD or Seagate, but they run hot. The average moron with their PC in a desk drawer will kill one of them in the first month. I've been running my raid-0 for two years now witho
          • Yep yep yep.

            I learned that lesson after killing a 7200rpm SATA drive. (Actually, I learned that lesson back in 1998 with SCSI drives, but I was being lax.)

            That's why I like things like the newer PC cases that put the drives sideways and stick a 120mm fan to pull air over them. (Antec Sonata, Antec p160, etc.)

            The other key bits in my toolkit are bay coolers. One lets you put up to (3) 3.5" drives into (2) 5.25" bays (try MWave for these), the other is a "4 in 3" bay design (CoolerMaster). If you d
        • Next most important is to keep your drives cool, on a clean power supply, and away from vibrations.

          I recently purchased a Fujitsu SCSI320 drive which had some interesting entries in one of the support pdf's, regarding expected lifetime versus heat:

          Measured surface temperature: Estimated drive life:

          40C or less: 5 years
          41C to 45C: 4.5 years
          46C to 50C: 4 years
          51C to 55C: 3.5 years
          56C to 60C: 3 years
          61C and more "Strengthen cooling power so that the DE surface temperature is 60C or less".

    • Amen to that. I had one crash several years ago. Then I read several people say they'd improved, so I bought another one last year. Blew up a month out of warranty. Never again.
    • Doesn't do any good if the drive has crashed. I will no longer buy WD; crappy quality.

      A word of advice from someone who was hurt by a flakey 340MB Maxtor many years ago. If you do this, eventually you will never want to buy ANY drive again. I have come across poor quality drives that died quickly with:

      Maxtor
      IBM
      Hitachi
      Fujitsu
      Toshiba
      WD
      Seagate

      Every drive manufacturer has its share of bad batches or makes a tech mistake which has big consequences. Some people get hurt and then complain in real life and on the n
      • Some people get hurt and then complain in real life and on the net and then replace that drive with some other manufacterer, get lucky with that drive and proclaim how great that company is.

        And the rest of us plan for failure by using RAID in addition to backups (and system images). I hate running systems without RAID, because I *know* that eventually that drive is going to fail at the worst possible moment.

        (I probably have close to a dozen IBM "Deathstars" (the 72GB models that everyone hated) that a

  • Product quality (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mr Smidge ( 668120 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:32PM (#14109043) Homepage
    Great! Now when can we expect similarly advanced levels of production and refinement in the spelling and grammatical skills of our summary writers?

  • 300MB/s my arse (Score:3, Informative)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:32PM (#14109044)
    That drive uses SATA 300MB/s, which means a peak speed, not a sustained speed. It seems the drive can manage 50-60MB/s sustained.

  • WD hard drive quality: you get what you pay for (Score:3, Insightful)

    by digidave ( 259925 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:40PM (#14109077)
    Western Digital SE drives are consumer-level drives not known for having high quality.

    WD also sells IDE and SATA RE and RE2 enterprise drives with MTBFs of 1 - 1.2 million hours. Why would anybody want to halve the MTBF of their drive by getting an SE drive just to save $30?

    Their RE and RE2 drives (or Raptor if you don't need huge capacity) are very high quality. These drives really kick ass and come in 8 MB (RE) and 16 MB (RE2) cache models. I bought four of the REs for a server and they've been performing flawlessly.

  • Where have you been living, in a bubble? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:43PM (#14109086)
    "With products like this available,"

    Yup, drives like this have been around for the last 6-12 months. They've probably shipped tens of thousands of them and you think they're cutting edge?

    "advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing,"

    Not really, have a look at the access time - 8.9 ms - this drive is just as fast as one from 8 years ago, it's just bigger. And guess what? that's why it has a 16MB cache. More platters, more heads, more cache plus greater data density equals... same access times. Hard drives don't scale up as well as other technologies.

    "especially considering the price level of this drive"

    Hang on a second, you can get cheaper than this. You can also get WD Raptors, which although smaller in capacity, are much, much faster. In fact, this is just a hard drive, like many other hard drives.

    These are the stories I hate. Pointless, heartless drivel passed by the editors who well, don't really edit, and appear to be out of touch with their readers, not to mention their market segment. An absolute, total and utter waste of screen inches - the kind of crap I'd expect to spout forth from a zit-faced store assistant who didn't know a molex connector from his arse. An embarrassment to read on Slashdot really. Shame on you.

  • From TFA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SteWhite ( 212909 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:45PM (#14109097)
    And if you spend 30 seconds looking at the article, as CmdrTaco should have, you will see that this drive does not deliver 300 Mb/sec. As reported by SiSoft Sandra, it gives 52 Mb/sec. Which many other high performance drives can match. The 300 Mb/sec figure is cache to host transfer speed, which with a 300 Mb/sec transfer and 16 Mb of cache, could be sustained for a whopping 0.0533333... seconds. Wow.
  • Had it on my Maxtor for the last 3 months. Way to catch up with the times.

    But in general, most hard drives are still severely underperforming, regardless of their specs on paper. Its the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems, causing system hangs and stutters on even the fastest systems.

    This industry needs a kick in the ass!

    300mb/s transfer rate on a system capable of procssing 8GB of data per second, that is nothing to rave about. Also, most systems still work off the principle that you can only
    • but there is no reason why a hard drive can't have multiple read/write heads to access different sectors of the disk as the same time

      It's called "seek time". The more massive (heavy... more parts, more heads) the read arm has, the slower the seek time is. The heads have to travel a shorter distance, but it requires more time to move them that distance. You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.

      Though the idea of a single drive striping, say across platters, is a nice idea. Really even that could be done with one
      • It's called "seek time".

        I assumed he was talking about having multiple servo/arms to employ multiple read/write heads. I've been wondering for a long time if we would ever see this in SCSI drives, to drive up their high I/O even more. High speed SCSI drives already use physically smaller disks. Having seperate read/write heads on seperate servo/arms at opposite ends of the drive could be a really good thing.

        It would of course increase complexity though and thus reduce durability.
        • That's actually not a bad idea, although the software for interleaving heads at different locations would be scarry to write. Probably not terribly much more than current though, considering the command queueing capability of modern drives. The onboard controller card would certainly get more complex though.

          That, and remember the reason HDs are rectangular is because of the arm assembly. If you want to add another one of those at the other end of the drive, the drive gets longer by about 2 inches. HD si
  • Have they improved overall quality also?
    I've had 50% fail rate (6 drives in one machine, one doa, two broken down after less than month in use) with western digital sata drives.
    I haven't lost any important data, but it's annoying to take machine apart every two weeks and send hdd back for warranty replacement.
    • (Inserts the usual litany)

      Top killers of hard drives (causing them to die early deaths):

      1. Heat -- what temperatures are your drives running at? My rule of thumb is anything over ~45C is too hot (because you have no margin of error for fan failure or A/C failure). Grab a copy of SpeedFan (for Windows) or use lmsensors(?) in Linux.

      2. Power -- Either poor power from the AC mains or an overwhelmed/cheap power supply. Get a better power supply (or get the proper size one) and evaluate your AC power.

  • Submitter is kind of clueless? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hklingon ( 109185 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:53PM (#14109134) Homepage
    Ok. All slashvertisement comments aside, I get as excited about 'teh new hotness' in drives as much as the next person. But this is SO poorly submitted. 300MB/sec? PLEASE. You MIGHT get 70% of that speed doing a transfer from that 16mb buffer to the controller, but that is just misleading. Without even reading, I'm guessing they're talking about 3Gb/sec SATA-II. Woo. So that is wrong. "Interface Speed" is what you wanted to say there. Not "Transfer Rate".

    What about "WD Characterizes this as the highest performance section of the desktop market." Wrong again. Helooo??? Raptor??

    I mean. Talk about something cool, at least. New TCQ optimizations? Read-before-write? 24/7 100% duty cycle?

    SR [storagereview.com] is a decent place to check out reviews and benchmarks. Do your homework! Astroturf like this only spreads confusion and disinformation.

    I got a 15k RPM SCSI drive from hypermicro. It is a seagate, 73gb. It was only about $250 with an adaptec controller (which wasn't a whole lot more than a WD74 gb raptor at the time). At the beginning of the disk, it has over a 90Mbyte xfer rate on a 160mbyte/sec interface, which totally crushes all this other crap. My drive is (was?) the leading drive on non-raid configurations on hdtach's website, even against the 400gb SATA WD behemoth. 2x36gb raptors are about the same speed as one decent 15k RPM scsi disk.

    I haven't really looked, but I would guess the drive in the post is what.. neighborhood of 60mbyte/sec? 70? Meh. Meh I say. We didn't even talk about I/Os/sec. between 7200 rpm, 10k RPM and 15k RPM.

    The idea of an article like this on slashdot is not bad. It is just that this article is misleading and/or wrong and isn't really news at all. And so on and so forth.
  • Come on guys, we get slashvertisements like this so often it's only fair to give them their own topic. You don't even have to make it hidable (although is that fixed yet anyway?), but I think you owe it to all of us to at least be honest about it. Pretending like this just insults our intelligence.

  • Silly Question... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Manip ( 656104 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @03:59PM (#14109158)
    So it runs at 300 MB/sec; but can you get 300 MB from it? .. I mean throwing out general performance numbers like that is completely meaningless.. How much of that data is in the cache? Does it before at 300 MB/sec for more than 16 MB? What if I do a number of seeks, how long does it take then?

    Point is you can't just create numbers and throw them out... The fairest way to do it is to compare a few similar drives using identical testing software that reflects real life read/writes on a disk over a period of time.

    I would also like to see advances made in drive redundancy; far more so than speed. Why is it when I have four or five platers in a drive, that any one failure can cause a 100% data loss? Shouldn't the data loss be limited to just that plater or read head? ... Perhaps a little R&D in that area, I know I'd pay more for data security.

    • Why is it when I have four or five platers in a drive, that any one failure can cause a 100% data loss?

      What are you talking about? I've never had a problem on one platter lead of 100% data loss. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time I had any problems with a specific platter... It's always the heads or electronics that fail.

      Short of practically building two complete drives in one, they can't have redundant independent systems like you want, so why don't you just buy two big cheap drives, and

  • lol (Score:2)

    by js3 ( 319268 )
    how much money did you get paid to post that? I thought it was generally accepted that the harddrive industry was lagging behind everyone else! I don't care how fast it is, just make it reliable :)
  • Slashdot now serves pop-up ads!

    I read it on a comment [slashdot.org] yesterday, I couldn't believe it... but now I can, because I've seen it happen. Slashdot just served me a pop-up to thinkgeek! And this is on a mac running Safari, so the machine shouldn't have spyware on it.

    Between the increase in slashvertisement, and now this... good bye, Slashdot! It's been good while it lasted.

    I'm sure this will be moderated off-topic, but there's no meta forum so... besides, I don't care about my karma anymore. You can have it.

  • Sustained transfer rate? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by miffo.swe ( 547642 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .molbdeh.leinad.> on Thursday November 24, 2005 @04:16PM (#14109235) Homepage Journal
    I dont care about spurious theoretical cache transfer rates. What i care about is the sustained transfer rate and the ability to do more than one thing at a time. Come to think of it i think i really hate HDs. When o when will we have solid state long time memory in our computers without moving parts?
    • You can get dual-CF to IDE adaptors for almost nothing from eBay - just plug in a couple of 1GB flash disks and you've got a 2GB solid state hard disk. Of course, it costs about 100 times as much per GB as a hard drive, but it's getting there. Once it gets to about 10GB I might be quite tempted by the idea of a laptop with a flash drive and put everything else on a nice big RAID NAS device.
    • When o when will we have solid state long time memory in our computers without moving parts?

      Just as soon as you're willing to pay 100Xs more for the option. You can do it right now if you want... I had a PC running on just 32MB of compactflash several years ago.

  • Nice but... (Score:2, Informative)

    by snevig ( 555801 )
    Storage Review [storagereview.com] has the Hitachi 7K500 [storagereview.com] as the best desktop performer out there right now.

    Their review [storagereview.com] of the WD2500KS compares it to the Hitachi 7K400 and the WD clearly loses out.

    The 7K500 is compared to the 7K400 in its review and the next-gen performance boost is quite clear.

  • Just Cheaper, Please (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @04:34PM (#14109318) Homepage Journal
    I'm pretty happy with drive performance. All I really want is lower per-byte prices. A RAID means drives can deliver data in parallel for faster data transfer; multiple RAIDs on a SAN or a PCI even faster. I want all their R&D going into making it cheaper. HDs right now cost $0.31:GB for 250GB drives. When that's down below $0.05:GB, I'll be interested in hearing about faster transfers on individual drives.
  • Seriously, someone should be going to jail for putting fraudulent values on the box.

    There are 1024 bytes in a kb, not 1000. Saying there's 1000 is false, it's wrong, and it's fraud. It's like Intel saying the 1.8GHz chip is 3.6GHz because they're using a harmonic.
    • Actually, you are wrong. In the good ol' times before this Kibi bullshit, capitalisation of 'k' and 'b' mattered unless you made it unambiguous by spelling out byte and bit.

      1kb = 1000 bits
      1Kb = 1024 bits
      1kB = 1000 bytes
      1KB = 1024 bytes
  • 250 GB hard drive has 300 MB/sec transfer rate

    Uh, no. Fastest almost any drive can transfer data off the platters is about 60-70MB/sec, and that's only the very tip-top of the line drives.

    What they mean is that it is a SATA-2 drive, which has a maximum wirespeed of 300MB/sec.

    I know this gives you faster access to the 16MB of cache- but main memory is much more 'accessible'(Gigabytes/sec makes even 300MB/sec seem slow), there's a hell of a lot more of it, and the OS is in a much better position to use

    • Uh, no. Fastest almost any drive can transfer data off the platters is about 60-70MB/sec, and that's only the very tip-top of the line drives.

      Actually, top of the line SCSI drives are actually pushing 100MB/s.

      Yes, that is 2^20 Megabytes and not the bullshit 10^6 MB.
  • The transfer rate during normal use is 20 MB/sec and has been for 10 years. No-one has ever made a hard drive go faster during normal use. Sequential reads from outer tracks have gotten up to 60MB/sec and bus speeds have allowed sequential RAID accesses from outer tracks to get up to 250 MB/sec but why pay for something advertized to perform at a level you'll only see 1% of the time?
    • The transfer rate during normal use is 20 MB/sec and has been for 10 years. No-one has ever made a hard drive go faster during normal use. Sequential reads from outer tracks have gotten up to 60MB/sec and bus speeds have allowed sequential RAID accesses from outer tracks to get up to 250 MB/sec but why pay for something advertized to perform at a level you'll only see 1% of the time?

      Where did you pull this 20 MB/sec figure? And what is this "normal use" for which you speak?

      For some of the things I do, I do
    • Older, smaller drives (40GB - 72GB), maybe.

      Stupid stat, but under Linux, when synchronizing a 300GB software RAID1 set, I'm seeing transfer rates of anything from 30-60GB/s. The 5400rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the lower end of that range, while the 7200rpm 300GB drives clocked in at the upper end of the range.

      Or, copying from disk to disk on a Windows box (7200rpm 250GB drives), I'll see transfer rates of 30-40MB/s.

  • Since when? The first hard drive I owned was a Quantum 105 Prodrive. 64K cache for a 100MB disk.
    A comparable size cache for the Maxtor would be over 128MB. The 16MB cache it actually has isn't huge. It's puny. It's just a little less puny than the cache's the other cheapskates puts on their drives.
  • My video card on my gaming PC has 256 MB of RAM. My cell phone has 24 MB. My thumb drives have 128 MB and 1 gig.

    16 MB is not a "monster" amount of RAM anywhere except hard drives. Why are they lagging so far behind everything else in this area?

  • For years now, I've recommended that one drive manufacturer be avoided at all costs - Western Digital.

    The longest life I've ever gotten out of one of their drives was about a year, and I've had several die within a month of installation. I don't think I've had one last less than 48 hours, so if you only need 2 days of data storage, they might be ok.

    Now, because of this, I haven't touched one of their drives (other than to recover data, and then throw it in the nearest trash can) in several years. Have the

Slashdot Top Deals

"The hands that help are better far than the lips that pray." -- Robert G. Ingersoll

Close