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.

Comments

*sniff* they had 17K in the late 1950s

[A nonymous Coward]

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.

--

Moore's Law For Drive

[MountainLogic]

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

What gets ~h~o~t~

[Skapare]

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.