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Advances in New Western Digital Drives
An anonymous reader writes "The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB hard drive has 300 MB/sec transfer rate the drive has a monster 16 MB cache, both of which should make it one of the best performing 7200 RPM drives on the market. WD categorizes this drive in the "Highest Performance" section of its desktop market, so its safe to assume that is has solid performance without the expense of an enterprise level drive. With products like this available, advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing, especially considering the price level of this drive."
Yet Another Press Release. Nice to see that Taco's tight editorial control hasn't been impaired by too much turkey. The guys at XYZ Computing are giving each other high-fives right now.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Western Digital SE drives are consumer-level drives not known for having high quality.
WD also sells IDE and SATA RE and RE2 enterprise drives with MTBFs of 1 - 1.2 million hours. Why would anybody want to halve the MTBF of their drive by getting an SE drive just to save $30?
Their RE and RE2 drives (or Raptor if you don't need huge capacity) are very high quality. These drives really kick ass and come in 8 MB (RE) and 16 MB (RE2) cache models. I bought four of the REs for a server and they've been performing flawlessly.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
"With products like this available,"
Yup, drives like this have been around for the last 6-12 months. They've probably shipped tens of thousands of them and you think they're cutting edge?
"advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing,"
Not really, have a look at the access time - 8.9 ms - this drive is just as fast as one from 8 years ago, it's just bigger. And guess what? that's why it has a 16MB cache. More platters, more heads, more cache plus greater data density equals... same access times. Hard drives don't scale up as well as other technologies.
"especially considering the price level of this drive"
Hang on a second, you can get cheaper than this. You can also get WD Raptors, which although smaller in capacity, are much, much faster. In fact, this is just a hard drive, like many other hard drives.
These are the stories I hate. Pointless, heartless drivel passed by the editors who well, don't really edit, and appear to be out of touch with their readers, not to mention their market segment. An absolute, total and utter waste of screen inches - the kind of crap I'd expect to spout forth from a zit-faced store assistant who didn't know a molex connector from his arse. An embarrassment to read on Slashdot really. Shame on you.
And if you spend 30 seconds looking at the article, as CmdrTaco should have, you will see that this drive does not deliver 300 Mb/sec. As reported by SiSoft Sandra, it gives 52 Mb/sec. Which many other high performance drives can match. The 300 Mb/sec figure is cache to host transfer speed, which with a 300 Mb/sec transfer and 16 Mb of cache, could be sustained for a whopping 0.0533333... seconds. Wow.
Had it on my Maxtor for the last 3 months. Way to catch up with the times.
But in general, most hard drives are still severely underperforming, regardless of their specs on paper. Its the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems, causing system hangs and stutters on even the fastest systems.
This industry needs a kick in the ass!
300mb/s transfer rate on a system capable of procssing 8GB of data per second, that is nothing to rave about. Also, most systems still work off the principle that you can only read or write one operation at a time. Sure caches offer speed improvements, but there is no reason why a hard drive can't have multiple read/write heads to access different sectors of the disk as the same time, turn a SINGLE drive into a STRIPE set. It can be done if you put your mind to it.
In order to get decent performance out of hard drives today, you have to buy 3 or more drives and setup a RAID 5 system and waste one drive for redundancy. But of course, the hard drive makers want you to do this, buying 3 drives instead of 1 to get decent performance is their goal, I am sure.
The problem is, hard drives have reached a point where they are cheap commodities. The leaders in this field have long since figured out how to make cheap and reliable drives while increasing storage space proprotionally to a reduction of price. Prices for hard drives keep getting cheap, and hard drive makers are not making that much money off them anymore.
This is why the whole external hard drive fad has started up, taking a $50/unit hard drive, stuffing it into a $25/unit external enclousure, and charging $300 retail for it. Add a back up button and maybe a USB port on the front and you suddenly create a "Must Have" product.
Because of this, there is no motivation to improve the technology. They figured out a few years ago how to dramatically increase storage space breaking what they preceived to be a physical barrier, and since then hard drive storage capacities double every year. With the ability to stack bits on top of each other, we will hit terrabyte storage capacities next year easily. But they are using the SAME TECHNOLOGY, the same magnetic media, read/write heads, packaging, I/O boards and chips, cache, etc, etc, etc. They may tweak these componenets to work with higher capacities, or improve performance somewhat, but nothing has really changes in terms of how hard drives are manufactured and designed. Compare this with the CPU industry that re-invents itself every 18-24 months.
Where are solid state hard drives? Where is my obscenely fast gamer performance extreme drive capable of feeding data to my video card in real time? Where is my tiny thumb sized drive capable of storing terrabytes of data?
The hard drive industry is just dolling out minor improvements and tweaks to existing technology, and expecting to be slapped on the back every time they boost storage capacity by a third or transfer rates by a quarter. Something seriously needs to happen in this industry to make hard drives hot technology again, its grown quite stale and cold over the last 10 years. Until then, I am underwhelmed with these kinds of press releases. Way to go Western Digital, your doing what EVERYONE else in the hard drive industry is doing! Sucking!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Ok. All slashvertisement comments aside, I get as excited about 'teh new hotness' in drives as much as the next person. But this is SO poorly submitted. 300MB/sec? PLEASE. You MIGHT get 70% of that speed doing a transfer from that 16mb buffer to the controller, but that is just misleading. Without even reading, I'm guessing they're talking about 3Gb/sec SATA-II. Woo. So that is wrong. "Interface Speed" is what you wanted to say there. Not "Transfer Rate".
What about "WD Characterizes this as the highest performance section of the desktop market." Wrong again. Helooo??? Raptor??
I mean. Talk about something cool, at least. New TCQ optimizations? Read-before-write? 24/7 100% duty cycle?
SR is a decent place to check out reviews and benchmarks. Do your homework! Astroturf like this only spreads confusion and disinformation.
I got a 15k RPM SCSI drive from hypermicro. It is a seagate, 73gb. It was only about $250 with an adaptec controller (which wasn't a whole lot more than a WD74 gb raptor at the time). At the beginning of the disk, it has over a 90Mbyte xfer rate on a 160mbyte/sec interface, which totally crushes all this other crap. My drive is (was?) the leading drive on non-raid configurations on hdtach's website, even against the 400gb SATA WD behemoth. 2x36gb raptors are about the same speed as one decent 15k RPM scsi disk.
I haven't really looked, but I would guess the drive in the post is what.. neighborhood of 60mbyte/sec? 70? Meh. Meh I say. We didn't even talk about I/Os/sec. between 7200 rpm, 10k RPM and 15k RPM.
The idea of an article like this on slashdot is not bad. It is just that this article is misleading and/or wrong and isn't really news at all. And so on and so forth.
While I agree with you that there's a market for such drives, the mfg's might be afraid that it'd canibalize their other sales.
They sell plenty of whitebox 5400rpm drives to the major computer assemblers (dude, buy a dell) and its hard for them to get consumers to buy more HDs. I can't image why they'd want to offer a larger & cheaper alternative to their money making drives.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't see it this way. When I look back over all my computers from 1991 to now, hard drive performance and capacity seems to be the most obvious thing that has increased. Back then, 40MB drives were common, and it took a long time to read all that data. Now, I can read that much data off my hard drives in less than a second, and 400GB drives are becoming common--a 10,000x increase in capacity. Back in the old days, I really had to worry a lot about what I had stored on my HD, because the space was quite limited, even with the smaller software of the day. Now, I don't even have to think much about it unless I'm storing lots of movies.
What other factors in computers have increased so much in that time?
Network speeds? Nope. Back then, I had a 2400bps modem, and 9600bps was fairly common. Now, the most you can have is 56000bps (theoretical), only a 23x increase. Pathetic. Good thing we have broadband now, but that's an entirely different thing. For LAN networks, we had 10Mbps ethernet back then; I'm not sure if 100Mbps was out by that time or not. Now, 100Mbps is common for most places (home networks, etc.), and GbE is getting common, though it's probably used a lot more in datacenters. That's a 100x increase.
CPU? Well, we now have 3.8GHz P4 processors (which perform about as well as much slower Athlons...), and while they're certainly much faster than my old 20MHz 286 in 1991, I really don't see much difference in regular desktop usage between my 3.6GHz P4 and my old 1GHz Duron from 3-4 years ago, or my 300MHz Celeron before that, unless I'm running transcode or something (i.e., not often). Word processing, web browsing, etc. all looks about the same to me, although I can open more browser windows now with 1GB of RAM which was uncommon 5 years ago. Furthermore, CPU performance has now hit a brick wall, and multi-core is the only way past it, which isn't helpful for single-threaded apps.
Local non-HD storage? Back in 1991, we had 1.44MB floppies, and now 4.7GB DVD+/-R discs are common, a 3,264x increase. I'd call this probably the second most noticeable and usable improvement in computers besides HDs, and interestingly enough, these are also mostly mechanical in nature, not silicon-based.
Video cards? Back in 1991 or so, I had a video card that could display 1024x768. These days, the highest resolution most people run is 1280x1024, not much of an improvement, and the highest is usually 1600x1200. Whoopee. Monitors have gotten bigger for most people, but they had huge monitors back in 1990 too, except they were really expensive. Of course, now video cards have entire processors on them specialized for 3D graphics, but what good is this? If you're a normal computer user, it's pretty much useless (no, teenagers who spend all their time playing video games are not "normal computer users"). GPU technology is great for console systems, but this discussion is about PCs, not video games.
Therefore, I'd say that hard drive performance is definitely the most obvious, most important, and most usable area of advancement for PCs over the last 15 years.
Some people get hurt and then complain in real life and on the net and then replace that drive with some other manufacterer, get lucky with that drive and proclaim how great that company is.
And the rest of us plan for failure by using RAID in addition to backups (and system images). I hate running systems without RAID, because I *know* that eventually that drive is going to fail at the worst possible moment.
(I probably have close to a dozen IBM "Deathstars" (the 72GB models that everyone hated) that are still chugging right along. I've probably replaced *2* of them in the past few years and those drives failed early in the cycle and those were likely killed by heat.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?