Review of First 10K IDE Drive
Sivar writes "StorageReview has a review of the first 10,000 RPM IDE hard drive. Despite the speed that other technologies are improving, this is the first rotational speed increase in almost six years for standard IDE drives." The review is pretty thorough, but also warns to keep in mind that the reviewed unit is only beta hardware.
then look out cause RAID here i come.
So what? An increase in heat and wear and tear on components, for what theroy says is ~25% speed increase. This drive doesn't even come close to that. I would think that for most apps that need this, a SCSI or RAID (or both) solution would be better.
Why would SCSI be less prone to heat and wear than IDE?
I think the point was just that SCSI provides better performance, even with 7200RPM. Much of that comes from the fact that SCSI drives are "smart" and require almost no CPU time, whereas IDE drives are "dumb", and require the CPU to handle much of the work.
The price differential, OTOH, is substantial.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
SCSI isn't that expensive, especially if you're willing to analyze what you're actually going to use, and not just RAID 0-ing two 80GB drives like a lot of people I know.
I picked up two Western Digital 9.1GB 10,000RPM SCSI drives for $35 each, shipped. If you don't have a controller, U-160 Cards can be had for about $70. I stick my OS on one drive, swap and applications on the second, and have a 45GB IDM Deskstar (75GXP and still running after 2 years, I like living on the edge) handling mass-storage tasks.
According to WD's site, these drives have transfer rates comparable to the 8MB Cache IDE drives, but seek times in the 5 ms range (vs. around 8.5). Oh, and they're not particularly loud either, at least not anything I've noticed.
At $160, this drive doesn't seem like a good idea. I've seen numerous 10K ~36GB SCSI drives for about $30 more. I guess you can factor in the card cost if you honestly want to, but if you're talking about RAIDing these things, you're probably talking about buying a good SATA or IDE RAID card anyway.
If you have plans to archive every friggin' CD you own in FLAC format, then SCSI isn't a cost-effective method to go. I don't. YMMV, but I've found that I can beat the hell out of the computer and I don't see the nasty drive access issues that I used to. For a site where a lot of people piss and moan about not needing this many mhz or that DX9-capable card, I'd say the logic of smaller faster drives when you probably aren't gonna fill the giant ones is pretty evident.