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."

Comments

Advances that aren't being rivaled?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the poster serious? Hard drive performance is one of the slowest areas of advancement in PCs there is. Granted that there's legitimate reasons for that, but to say that because its got a bigger cache we're seeing advances not seen anywhere else is laughable.

Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives. The amount of "advancement" in the video cards far outpaces the drives, except for the really big drives that can store weeks worth of pr0n at once.

Re:Advances that aren't being rivaled?

[vrt3]

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).

You don't see much improvement in regular desktop usage precisely because all the other components haven't had performance increases as much as the CPU. Memory is notoriously falling more and more behind. And many tasks are I/O-bound rather than CPU-bound, which means that speed increases in the CPU won't help unless the I/O bottlenecks get faster. One of those bottlenecks is in many cases still the HD.

Interesting Fact

[matr0x_x]

A little known fact about the WD2500KS is that it has a sister WD2800KS due out in 4 months with double the storage and 35% higher performance. Of course the cost isgoing to be MUCH higher too

Big, Slow Drives

[jimmyhat3939]

Note to hard-drive manufacturers:

Please come out with a larger, slower drive for those masses of us who want to store very large quantities of data but don't care so much about 7,200 RPM or large cache sizes and whatnot.

When will the 1TB hard drive come out? When oh when?
--
Free 411! 1-800-411-SAVE

Silly Question...

[Manip]

So it runs at 300 MB/sec; but can you get 300 MB from it? .. I mean throwing out general performance numbers like that is completely meaningless.. How much of that data is in the cache? Does it before at 300 MB/sec for more than 16 MB? What if I do a number of seeks, how long does it take then?

Point is you can't just create numbers and throw them out... The fairest way to do it is to compare a few similar drives using identical testing software that reflects real life read/writes on a disk over a period of time.

I would also like to see advances made in drive redundancy; far more so than speed. Why is it when I have four or five platers in a drive, that any one failure can cause a 100% data loss? Shouldn't the data loss be limited to just that plater or read head? ... Perhaps a little R&D in that area, I know I'd pay more for data security.

Sustained transfer rate?

[miffo.swe]

I dont care about spurious theoretical cache transfer rates. What i care about is the sustained transfer rate and the ability to do more than one thing at a time. Come to think of it i think i really hate HDs. When o when will we have solid state long time memory in our computers without moving parts?

Re:This is not new or special

[ergo98]

Wow.

Clearly it's a slashvertisement, as all of the linked articles are

• Terribly, terribly, terribly written
  
• Incredibly abusive of readers, spreading the limited, technically vacuous horrific prose over a dozen pages
  

If the Slashdot crew accepted those submissions without payment then they should commit hari kari now, because their use on this planet is done. If they did receive a kick-back - which I think is unquestionable - then I think this pretty effectively puts them on notice.

Good catch.

Remarkable that Slashdot is at such a vulnerable time, when there is a tide of credible competitors emerging, and they pull stunts like this.

Just Cheaper, Please

[Doc Ruby]

I'm pretty happy with drive performance. All I really want is lower per-byte prices. A RAID means drives can deliver data in parallel for faster data transfer; multiple RAIDs on a SAN or a PCI even faster. I want all their R&D going into making it cheaper. HDs right now cost $0.31:GB for 250GB drives. When that's down below $0.05:GB, I'll be interested in hearing about faster transfers on individual drives.

Re:Doesn't do any good if

[billcopc]

Statistical manufacturing defects aside, I'd say the #1 reason for a failed drive is a cheap system. That 200$ PC uses a 7$ power supply and no fans except the CPU. Not all 300watt power supplies are created equal.

These hard drives need juice and they need cooling. I have been a Maxtor nut forever because they run faster than any WD or Seagate, but they run hot. The average moron with their PC in a desk drawer will kill one of them in the first month. I've been running my raid-0 for two years now without a hitch. The trick ? I always stick a nice big 120mm fan right across the hard drives, blowing around them. And believe me, they don't sit idle all day. I've got 6-way Raid-0 for a reason; I thrash them harder than your average SQL server.

Now I'm citing Maxtor because they tend to run the hottest (performance driven), but this applies to all hard drives. If you let heat stagnate, you will kill any electronic device, it is merely a matter of time. Take care of your gear and it will last a long time.

Re:This is not new or special

[rew]

could two (or more) SATA1 drives on a SATA2 bus exceed 150 MB/s in total? I would think not, in which case SATA2 is a big advantage if you want multiple drives on a bus.

Well...... I'd vote against two drives on one bus. SATA is point to point. Max one drive per connection.

So the article, and the WDC website claim 300MB per second transfer rate. That's THEORETICAL buffer-to-host. Apparently someone measured that at 170 Mbyte per second.

Platter to buffer is an impressive 748 Mbit per second. That's an impressive 93.5 Mbyte per second!!!!! Read on and "sustained max" is 65 Mbyte per second. Duh. That's pretty normal for a 2005 drive. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Now about the advantage of SATA2 (300MB/s) versus SATA1 (150MB/s).

You get to use the extra bandwidth if you let the disk buffer (16 MB) fill with data from the platter (65Mb/sec) -> about 250 ms. And then suddenly you decide that you need all that data in the computer's main memory.

If this happens just once, you win some 200ms. That's hardly noticable. It would matter if it happens lots of times in a row. But it is a very very funny traffic pattern where your disk is able to cache 250 ms worth of data into its buffer while the computer doesn't "see it coming", and has to take full advantage of the much smarter drive. Right! Nah.

The buffer should be large enough that if you're streaming say 200Mbyte per second off 4 drives in striping RAID, the drive should "stay ahead", and while you're handling the other three drives, the buffer shouldn't overflow. So the RAID block size should not exceed about 10 mbyte. Well, that's outrageous. The buffer is QUITE large enough.

At 7200 RPM, or 120 rotations per second, and 65 Mbyte per second. we can calculate the data density to be about 0.5 Mbyte per track. So with a buffer of more than two tracks (one megabyte), you quickly approach the theoretical throughput.

Really, there is nothing special about this drive.

Re:This is not new or special

[Not The Real Me]

SCSI has always held the top spot.

This IDE has a buffer to disk speed of 93.5 megs/sec. Interestingly enough, the article fails to mention what the CPU load is.

For all important items, I use a SCSI, usually Ultra160 since U320 is still quite expensive. IDE is what I use for secondary storage since IDEs do chew up CPU cycles.

Re:Doesn't do any good if

[WuphonsReach]

Yep yep yep.

I learned that lesson after killing a 7200rpm SATA drive. (Actually, I learned that lesson back in 1998 with SCSI drives, but I was being lax.)

That's why I like things like the newer PC cases that put the drives sideways and stick a 120mm fan to pull air over them. (Antec Sonata, Antec p160, etc.)

The other key bits in my toolkit are bay coolers. One lets you put up to (3) 3.5" drives into (2) 5.25" bays (try MWave for these), the other is a "4 in 3" bay design (CoolerMaster). If you don't pack them full (e.g. only put 2 drives in the 3:2 unit, or 3 drives in the 4in3 unit), the 80mm/120mm fans on the front keep even hot 7200rpm drives cool to the touch. Plus, the 80/120mm fans are *quiet* when compared to the normal 2x40mm fans used on regular 5.25" bay coolers.

As for power... I used to have a (6) drive ATA RAID that would constantly drop a disk every few weeks. Nothing physically wrong with the disks, the array would simply drop the drive and start rebuilding with the hot spare. Upgrading to a better UPS along with a better case/powersupply fixed the issue for good. (The array stopped dropping drives.)