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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."
"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.
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.