Hard Drive Overclocking Competition From Secau

Blittzed writes "We were reminiscing about the good old days of overclocking CPUs and memory, and the subject of hard drive overcloking came up. The discussion / argument we were having in the research lab ended up in a bet which now has to be settled. So, we are putting our money where our mouth is, and putting up $10,000 to anyone who can read a 500GB drive in under an hour. We will also consider other attempts with a smaller amount of money in the event that the one hour is not possible. There are a few rules (e.g. the drive still needs to work afterwards), but otherwise nothing is ruled out. Specific details can be found on the URL. Go let the white smoke out!"

Hmm...

[screwzloos]

I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html [tomshardware.com]

No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.

Re:An hour?

[0123456]

With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.

I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.

Re:Hmm...

[a_nonamiss]

Is that 15k RPM drive a "Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX)." It's stated pretty clearly in the rules that it needs to be that model. I don't think they're going for a speed test here, because there are plenty of SSDs that blow that speed away. They're trying to take a "normal" drive and super-speed it, for forensic purposes.

Re:Is that all?

[Sloppy]

I always wondered why this was not done

If you look at it the right way (translation: I'm about to break a rule) it's done all the time. It's called RAID0.

But seriously, that tells you why it's not done: because if your really care about performance that much, you can get more performance than a multi-head-set drive and spend less money by using commodity parts. If you make a drive that works this way, no one will buy it. (Except for money laundering purposes. ;-)