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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.
Nice to know they are finally starting to speed up the slowest part of the computer again.
At these speeds, would you hardware be more likely to 'burnout'?
If they can make these beauties with a serial-ATA interface, I AM SOLD!
Although, somewhere, I read that the RPMs are not directly related to the speed of the drive (I'm assuming seek rates/access times). Is this true? Obviously faster drives are louder and run hotter, but do they "by definition" outperform slower RPM drives?
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
if the manufacturers of these 10K SATA drives would offer two different sets of firmware - one optimized for locality access for desktops and another for the more scatter/gather usage patterns seen on servers. How WD et.al. will position this drive for production remains to be seen.
But hasn't there been several articles around that show hard drive RPM to be a minimal factor in the performance of HDDs?
5400 -> 7200 wasn't that advantagous, but will 7200 -> 10000 be that much better?
Don't we get better performance improvements from tweaks to the file system and how it writes and spaces out its blocks and cylinders?? Or are we at those limits already?
When Western Digital raised the bar nearly 1.5 years ago, we repeatedly pointed out that the Special Edition (JB series) Caviar was what readers really wanted when they speculated over 10,000 RPM ATA drives.
Equipped with an 8-megabyte buffer and accompanying firmware aggressively tuned for single-user scenarios, the WD1000JB easily matched and even exceeded the performance that the best 10k RPM SCSI drives of the era delivered when it came to desktop performance.
While SCSI drives feature superior mechanics, their server orientation forces them to trade away firmware optimized for highly-localized patterns in favor of strategies that maximize returns in random access scenarios. In the Raptor, WD faces much of the same quandary.
--
est modus in rebus
Maxtor IDE 10k RPM??? What is it's model number? I don't think ANYONE had heard of any 10k RPM ATA drive before this one.
I know of plenty of 10k RPM SCSI drives, but not ATA. And, yes, the early 10k SCSI drives screamed like a jet...
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Those said, I have a few other things I'd like to say. First of all, it's nice to see that the drive is quiet. Even many 5400 and 7200 RPM drives are quite loud today. It's nice to know that going to 10k isn't going to turn my PC into a jet engine. Also, they mention that the reason that we haven't seen 10k IDE drives before was that servers didn't want them since they couldn't be hotswapped like SCSI. SATA supports hotswap in theory, but can you hotswap today? I don't think Windows lets you, IIRC (or if it does the system is a bit unstable afterwards). Does Linux let you hotswap SATA drives? If all the drives are one one controller (say RAID 5, or something else redundant) and you swap a drive, does the OS even know it happened? I don't have any expirence with hotswapping hard drives.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Since SCSI drives are obviously not targetted at the commodity/home market, manufacturers spend a few extra bucks on the mechanical parts, including fluid bearings, better motors, and more testing time to build a drive more suited for a server market. With a better mechanical build, less heat is generated and higher MTBF figures are posted. Mechanically, there is little required difference between a SCSI and IDE drive, but electronically and in the market, there is. At the same time, these cooler, better drives do cost more for a reason!
My main concern is its actual capabilities when being used to store/delete/etc large, numerous files and how long until the hard drive finally crashes and dies out.
The Raptor has a 5-yr warranty (5 times as long as most desktop hard drives) and is targetted for the server market. Unless WD seriously screwed up, I am willing to be that it is about as reliable as other enterprise 10K drives (all of which are SCSI)--that is to say, incredibly reliable.
A 10k IDE drive is bound to have a ton of hard drive space
Actually, the faster the platter spins, the lower density each platter must be in order for the heads to keep up. For example, the Western Digital Raptor is a 36GB drive with a single 36GB platter (that's 18GB/side). This is the same size of platter as on the largest of 10KRPM SCSI drives.
To contrast, the largest platter size on a 7200RPM drive is 80GB/platter (or 40GB/side), and Weste3rn Digital is about to release a 250GB drive which will have three 83.3GB platters.
Higher platter density improves speed as well, but generally speaking (VERY generally speaking), increasing rotational speed improves drive performance more than having a somewhat higher density platter. Those of course varies based on what you are doing with the drive, whether it involves lots of random accesses (mail/webserver) or lots of linear accesses (video editing) or something in between.
In general, expect higher RPM drives to trail behind lower RPM drives in platter density, and therefore in maximum available disk space.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Have anybody ever actually thought about it? For the amount of extra money to blow, why not spend more for memory and have EVERYTHING run from there? what, 4G is not enough for your desktop system? x86 only addresses that much right now, ya know...
:)
Compare the price of 4GB of RAM with a 10GB hard drive. Also note that all memory used for a RAMdisk (as disk which will vanish once power is turned off) will be unavailable to applications.
Notice that computers run on multiple tiers of increasingly large and decreasingly expensive storage. This has been found to have the best performance/cost ratio. First we have registers, then L1 cache (except for Pentium IV's), then L2 cache, then on some systems L3 cache, THEN RAM, then the hard drive.
RAM is simply not cost effective for mass storage, and the performance benefits of using a RAMdrive really aren't very noticeable for many tasks. They help immensely for extremely random I/O, like running a mailserver, but Office and Diablo2 aren't going to run so much faster that it justifies the huge jump in cost and huge increase in risk (RAM drive dying when power goes out).
Besides, if we used a slow hard drive to load 4GB of data into RAM, can you imagine how long booting the system would take?
That said, there are companies offering battery-backed RAMdrives which fit in a PCI slot, and there are those (Armadillo comes to mind) which offers huge, fast FLASH-RAM drives in both IDE and SCSI flavors, but they are very expensive. There's more to making one than simply collecting a bunch of DIMMS together, ya know.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Drives like all hardware are built to a price point.
You can built a 7200rpm drive and a 15000rpm drive to have exactly the same MTBF. However the 15k rpm drive will have much tighter tolerances, better bearings, and therefore be more expensive.
Enterprise drives have a higher MTBF than consumer drives, therefore enterprise drives cost more.
Virtually memory was a short term hack when memory was critically limited: Nowadays you could literally disable it in most configurations.
;)
Actually, virtual memory is still used today and has nothing to do with hard drives, though this is widely believed. Virtual memory is the ability for an operating system to tell all programs that they can address the full addressable range of the processor, that is, with 32-bit CPUs that each program has access to 4GB of RAM. It happens that many operating systems use hard disk space as a substitute for RAM when there isn't enough physical memory, but the use of hard drive space as memory is not the definition of virtual memory.
I was under the same impression myself not too long ago.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Hmm, I'm going to have to disagree. What you're saying (that rotational speed alone doesn't matter) is true, but only if you're just interested in continuous transfers. For continuous transfers, you can bump up the density and get better rates.
In the real world, lots of transfers aren't continuous. For instance, if your computer ever starts swapping, it writes pages of data out to the disk according to how recently used they were, and it writes them wherever there's free space. And faulting those pages back in from disk is even worse. A page gets faulted in when a memory access attempt finds that it's no longer in RAM. And when that happens, it could be any page -- it's just whatever data your program decided to access at that time. So when you're faulting data in from swap space, no controller is smart enough to predict the access pattern, and you just have to rely on your disk being fast enough to get there before you die of boredom.
By the way, for the lay-person, the easy way to understand whether seek time is important for a given computer activity is to listen to the drive during the activity. The clicking or clattering noise you hear is the drive seeking, i.e. moving its head to a new position. So basically, if you hear a lot of clattering noise from your drive, it means you're experiencing a pretty random access pattern.
IBM SCSI drives are generally the slowest, loudest, least reliable, hottest SCSI drives on the market. That said, $99 is dirt cheap, but you'd be happier with a fast IDE drive or a real SCSI drive, like a Maxtor Atlas 10K-3 (which are also quite inexpensive)
ALso, take a look at ResellerRatings.com for TigerDirect. I wouldn't order from them...
For SCSI drives, I have found HyperMicro generally has the best prices among companies that are trustworthy, and that them, Newegg, Mwave, or Dell have the best IDE prices.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I find this drive a disapointment.
.2ms access times we will really start to see some impressive things.
This drive uses 36gb per platter.
On a 10,000 rpm drive the platters need to be somewhat smaller, due to them physically spinning faster it can cause "problems" with a full size 3.5" disk @ that speed.
Hence they physically make the disk smaller, so I can totally understand them NOT acheiving the current 7200rpm "flagship" 83gb per platter, however 36gb per platter is quite old for 10,000 rpm drives, which is quite a shame, 50 gb per platter would have been magnificent.
Unfortunately due to this, it indicates (at least to me) that this is nothing new technology wise, but a 10,000rpm disk with an SATA controller strapped on to it, they may have even licensed it from their buddies @ IBM (since they used to be chummy in the early 7200rpm days of ATA)
I'm having some guys on the SR forums claim the drive isn't that bad at all and that claiming it's a disapointment is silly because it still does X, and that's fine it's their opinion.
However MY opinion is that this drive LOGICALLY should be *THE* fastest ATA drive in existence, bar none in all benchmarks - that's what we enthusiasts want and what we will pay for - we want it to not only be faster than all 7200rpm drives (bar none) but be the fastest ATA drive period - if they can acheive this and truely blur that SCSI / ATA line - the "geeks / losers and enthusiasts" (read: myself and many others) will glady drop the same money we would normally drop to receive 2.5 and even 3x the space.
As I've said previously, most people (I feel) who initially saw the PR for this disk approx 3 weeks ago would have thought this: - "that drive will be the fastest at everything ever besides scsi" that's their expectations, and that's mine - and unfortunately it's not the case.
So some of you may like the drive, but after reading SR's review I'm not down with that drive at all - also take note the drive makes the distinct "10,000rpm whine" sound which is disapointing as well.
Big sigh from me...... these damn "hacked up" tape drives (which is all a hard disk is a "SUPER" tape drive) should be long gone by now! - magnetic spinning media has been holding the PC back for a long time, the second we have 100mb a second (slow by todays memory standards) and sub
Any faster, and AMD will grow angry at their loss of the Heat Champion Throne. ;)
AMD already lost that title to Intel's 3.06GHz P4, which can output over 100W of heat (compared to 74 for the hottest AMD chip).
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra