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Seagate Spins 15k RPM HDs
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.
Why, I can remember the days when I used a wax-based 33rpm storage system! None of this 15,000 kind of stuff for me, nosir, it's LPs or the highway.
Just how fast can current technology take us with hard drives? What are the other technologies being developped to cope with speed limitations that we'll certainly hear about in the near future, not to mention to lower the price of the current hard drives out there?
EraseMe
Wow. 15 whole RPMs? Watch out, we're cruising now... That's what? About 1 Round every 4 seconds???
What Taco didn't mention, is that the platters are about four kilometers in diameter. So, 15 RPM looks pretty sweet.
I've done some reading about these new drives and word is that the super high RPMs generate so much heat that Seagate has taken to routing coolant through the drive heads just like blood through your body. Of course the little coolant pipes are tiny tiny, but they're there, chillin out, to use the parlance of our times.
Try reading the article instead of trying to get a fast post (#6 in your case). Yes, it has a faster actuator/seek time as well as faster spindle speed, 3.9 ms. The spin also brings the latency down from 2.99 ms to 2.0 ms, they said. I am curious how noisy those suckers are going to be.
Wow, that's really fast...the engine in my car would blow up if it even thought about going that fast.
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
You know what pisses me off most about this stuff? Every time I shop for hds for my Linux box (I don't do IDE, except for spare storage space), they require a whole new SCSI card.
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!!
And I used it in the early 1970s. Univac SS90 (90 column cards, round holes) had a 50,000 digit (5000 words x 10 digits) 17,000 rpm drum for main memory. Now Seagate is getting close, but they aren't up to that yet, and by gum, never mind that Seagate claims all the other manufacturers are 2 quarters behind: they are all 42+ years behind Univac.
Dang thing took an hour to spin down and ten minutes to spin up.
--
Infuriate left and right
I remember my old BBC Micro. A single tape drive that was pretty unreliable at 300baud.
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.)
Now that's fast. I remember when 60ms was fast.
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.)
Progress in storage follow Moore's Law rather closely for both size metrics (Areal density)
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
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
--onyx--
Why isn't this called a 50X drive? That's how much faster it is than a 5.25" drive, and that seems to be how other drive speeds are measured, based on the speed of the first popular drive of the type... :-)
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.
Enforce Darwinism
Crap, that stupid
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.
--
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...
One thing that has interested me for a while is what is the chance of a HDD fragmenting. I dont mean no data defragmentation. I mean physical defragementation.
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.
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
If the sounds of these drives are anything like their Cheetahs we may need to sue them for tinnitus aggravation.
Now that's fast. I remember when 60ms was fast.
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. 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?
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!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It actualy exist, or at least have existed. I remember that a friend of mine had a LP where the last track was a program for a Sinclair Spectrum. The program was ment to be started at the same time as you played the music and wow, you get a music video. (The Spectrum normaly stored programs on an audio casette recorder, through a standard line out/line in.) I don't remember the title on the LP, not even the artist/group.
If you can't stand the risk of getting killed by your hard disk, go and play with dolls instead.
The things will be SCSI. Segate is aiming them at the Enterprise and upward class server market. Anyone who puts an IDE disk in an important server is an ignoramous. There anre a plethora of reasons to still use SCSI for server applications, although IDE is becoming very fast.
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!
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
The speed is nice but I read an article on AnandTech.com that says that to acheive such speed, they had to reduce the plater size considerably. Meaning that these drive are curently limited to 18 gig. Not bad but it still makes you lon for those 40+ gig monstrosities that are comming out.
For a preview on the drive at (duh) www.storagereview.com
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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?
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
You'd think the advantages of drums would still apply today. I bet the data density and sustained read would be a lot better (and obviously more consistent) in both cases.
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.
Maybe speed reading is your problem. You don't go for comprehension. They made it clear that two different aspects have been sped up. In fact I thought I made it clear as well. Spindle speed and the thing that moves the drive head were both separately improved. Read the article again. SLOWLY. :)
The calculation of the rotational speed that gives the maximum access speed is left as an exercise for the reader.
Given the utterly clueless replies in this thread, I suppose I should clarify that I mean the advantages of a drum compared to a disc using the same modern material science advances etc. NOT the ancient main memory drum vs. modern RAM or even against a modern HD.
Most hard drives have current ratings right on the label. All the ones I have say something close to this:
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.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
Wow, 15,000 RPM's. Putting that through my trusty calculator, thats 250 R per second. Pretty soon these things are going to be going so fast they'll injure someone if they get loose and fly out. Just think about the damage one of those things could cause inside your computer. :)
-- Moondog
Comeon man,
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.
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!
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)
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
At least not in the one I programmed. Nothing but drum. No core, no RAM. One gate per circuit card I think. Worked on it for about 3 years. Maybe they snuck it in by the time you got to it :-)
--
Infuriate left and right
200 words per band sounds familiar. No parallel reads; all serial. 17 microsecond word time.
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.
--
Infuriate left and right
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.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Hey, as great as this may sound, our quest for speed is creating hardware dangers. At 15,000 RPM, on a platter about 3" in diameter you're getting speeds around 140 mph. For those of you in metric (as we all should be) that's about 8 cm diameter, 60 feet per second, or 230 kph. That's really fast. That could break through casings and possibly sink an inch or possibly much more into soft tissue. In the right places, that can kill. Sure, the odds are low, but who wants to take that chance? (Remember the guy whose story was recently posted here because he was misidentified in a DNA match?) If it's in mass distribution, it could happen. A notable feature of Moore's law is that as technology advances, it also changes. A modern chip (Athlon, PIII, UltraSPARC, G4, Alpha, or your favorite miscellaneous supercomputer) is far more complex than the 8086 that's rusting in the next room. They did a lot more than just make it more compact for the transistors and increase the clock speed. Periodically, the technology must change qualitatively to enable further quantitative improvements. From what I can see, we should start examining more optical solutions, since that seems to be much greater opportunity in density, although it is not yet being fully exploited. Maybe holographic cubes are the answer. I recently saw some specs for an experimental quantum system (binary) that uses lasers to access data stored by bacteriorhodopsin, a chemical similar to what activates the light sensors in our eyes. They think they can make a system that would run at about PC33 speeds, with a cubic dimension of a centimeter, with 4096 storage nodes in each dimension. That's 4096x4096x4096 bits, or 8 GB, at nearly RAM speed. A few modifications, and I'll be a happy customer.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Does "15000rpm" strike anyone else as odd, considering that mainstream drives have spindle speeds that are multiples of 1800rpm (e.g. 5400, 7200)?
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...)
begin 644
I remember my friend showing me a SCSI hard drive a few years back they had somehow gotten to go spin faster than it was supposed to, and generate enough centripetal force to knock over the entire computer case. Quite amusing.
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.
Wow. I really like these drives going faster and faster. I can't wait till they break the light barrier. Imagine a harddisk that spins faster than the speed of light. Due to time dilation, your requested data will arrive before you even requested it! That would be a solution to a lot of problems. Of course, there's the problem that it's impossible for matter to go faster than the speed of light, but hey, one has got to fantasize, right?
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
I have a 52X Kenwood, and lately it's been getting more picky about what CD's it wants to read. I'm also getting more and more buffer underruns while copying from that drive, so I have to copy through the HD. Never had that problem with my previous CD Reader. Seems like I've been reading reports on low reliability around the newsgroups also.
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...
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
15,000 rpm. That's 500 rpm SLOWER than the redline of a Yamaha R6 motorbike.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
I think it's in the jargon file; I just remember it as a bit of folklore :)
... !berkley!prime3!hawk@olivetti.atc
:)--once he saw it, he could send a message right back up the same path. If he didn't, maybe you'd be lucky and someone else would see it; maybe not.
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}
I don't know why it only occurred to me in the last few days instead of years ago, but . . .
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 mean, what more can you say? you ROCK! This reminded me of abusing CD's in another way. When I went to school and worked at the campus newspaper, we got a LOT of music cd's for "review." It was cool when you got good ones but there was inevitably a lot of crap. I mean you put it on and listend to three songs, everyone either agreed it sucked or some poor soul took it home. Then we went to the parking lot after the press ran and had "the CD Discus Olympics (open division)". Cd's from the local pressing plant were extremely light and cheap and if you threw 'em high, they would shatter into a goodly number of pieces upon impact with the asphault..... :)
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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.
Of course, you should still worry about the noise even if it's not audible. Ultrasonic noise can do damage to our ears just as easily as normal noise, even if there aren't any harmonics in our range of hearing.