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.

Comments

ObPrediction

[commodoresloat]

7200 RPM should be fast enough for anybody.

It would be nice

[T5]

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.

Re:Can they produce these with a serial ATA interf

[CanSpice]

You mean exactly like the one they reviewed?

Did you even read the article?

Re:Finally...

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Nice to know they are finally starting to speed up the slowest part of the computer again.

You mean the user?

10K hard drive?!

[EverStoned]

Did we go back in time to 1975?!

Re:Big deal.

[Sokie]

Well this WD drive does sport a 1.2 million hour MTBF and 5 year warantee. It's pretty much built with reliability in mind since they are targetting entry- and mid-level servers.

-Sokie

An important paragraph...

[La Temperanza]

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.

Looks like

[Rooked_One]

even 10,000 rotations per minute isn't enough to keep up with the /. effect.

Things To Keep In Mind

[MBCook]

There are a few things to keep in mind about these numbers. Most of them are mentioned in the article, but they're scattered around. Just think about these things:

• Seperate Card - Remember that the SATA controller is on a seperate card, it's not integrated into the chipset. So these number could (and probably will) change for the better when we see SATA built into the southbridge later this year (was it Grandale from Intel that will do this? I'm too lazy to look it up).
• Drive Size - The drive in the review is up to 1/6th the size of some of the other drives in the review. So if you're comparing this drive you have to remember that it would perform better if it was a 160 gig drive and didn't have to work all over it's platter.
• SATA - All the other drives in this review are either ATA or SCSI. So as SATA goes, this drive might be king of the hill by far.

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.

Re:Finally...

[Sivar]

Yeah, but how long till it fries itself?

I'd rather have something slow that I can trust, rather than something that goes out in a brillant ball of fire--even though it was really fast.

The reviewed drive has a 5 year warranty. How long is the warranty on your slower drive?

The Seagate Cheetah X15.3 is the world's fastest hard drive (until the Maxtor Atlas 15K is released). It is one of the most reliable drives you can buy, with an extremely high rating in StorageReview.com's reliability survey, and an excellent history in IBM, Dell, etc's enterprise servers.

"Slower is more reliable" doesn't hold water anymore, though it is true that early 7200 RPM IDE drives were less reliable than the slower 5400 RPM drives.

Re:Stand back and watch for now..

[Sivar]

There's no margin on a $60.00 drive. It seems to be that way, since once drives hit about the $75 mark they tend to be phased out.
I find it extremely impressive that they can get that cheap at all.
MaxtorSCSI, a SCSI engineer at Maxtor (funny, that), and a forum user on StorageReview.com, stated once that hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices, by far, in the average person's home.
The platter has to be so flat that, spinning at thousands of RPM, the heads must float above the platter at less than 1/50 the width of a human hair, or slightly more distance than the width of an average smoke particle. And they have to survive being bumped, because if those heads touch the platters, all hell (and the heads) breaks loose.