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

This is not new or special

[Anonymous Coward]

WD released this drive at least 3 months ago, and other drives with 16mb caches have been out even longer.

This is just another useless anonymously submitted article by Sal Cangeloso that may in fact be a slashvertisement. Notice the price listing on the first page, unless of course you have your ads blocked.

Re:This is not new or special

[MoonBuggy]

Not only is it an advert, it's an incorrect one. If you want to be using an "enterprise level" drive, it's the 400GB WD4000KD you should get - same series (Caviar SE16), but the hardware is physically identical to the newest 400GB 'Raid Edition 2' from WD. The 400GB Caviar SE16 model is based on the 10k Raptor family of drives designed for maximum speed, whereas the 250GB SE16 is descended from the standard-issue Caviar family. The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.

Note that I don't intend to advocate any one of these drives - I couldn't care less what you buy, I just want to lay out the facts properly.

Re:This is not new or special

[spatenbrau]

According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1.

Seeing how the overall data-rate off of the heads is only in the 60MByte/sec to 90MByte/sec range, all this talk of 300MByte channels is bordering on dishonesty with numbers. The burst rate sounds like it is simply the speed at which the on-board cache can be read at. That isn't going to a number that influences much other than artificial benchmarks.

This article is just another article from an ever growing number of "fan-boy" review sites that read like ad-copy. A real review would test the disk throughput with something similar to:

dd if=/dev/wd0c of=/dev/null bs=1m

and then note the true MBytes/sec that the disk achieved. This is the best-case number that essentially allows the disk to stream with very little track-to-track stepping. Good disks will be able to do 60MBytes/sec on the outer tracks, but will usually slow to 2/3rd's that speed on inner tracks.

Re:This is not new or special

[Shanep]

According to the article, the 250GB bursts hit 171 MB/s, so actually it would be hindered by SATA1. Burst speed isn't my #1 consideration anyways, but it's something.

Drive quoted burst speed comes from or to on drive cache anyway. That cache is good to help the drive sustain it's highest read transfer rates through read-ahead (when the OS comes back for the next block, it has already been read from disk) and also an OS can send small writes to the drive faster. But in practice this mostly just helps a disk to meet it's highest sustained transfer rates. The burst speed sounds good and 16MB cache sounds good, but in these modern times, when we use OS' which use free memory as buffer/caches, we have a LOT of memory and that memory is REALLY FAST, on-drive caches are mostly being used as buffers. As far a caching goes, they don't really get used all that much, since re-reading a block will almost always come from system RAM before it comes from drive cache RAM. Sure it is true that the read-ahead caching on the drive is caching, but in practice it is mostly used as a buffer.

Are there some other SCSI drives with higher performance now?

From a practical point of view or from a meaningless burst speed point of view due to large on-drive caches and fast busses?

I have a Fujitsu SCSI320 drive which sustains about 94MB/s at the beginning of the disk, which slowly tapers off to about 64MB/s at the end of the disk. That is faster than the raptor and this SCSI drive is also faster than the raptor in other aspects like read service times, I/O rates, etc.

There have been Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi SCSI drives faster than the raptor for a long time. The Maxtor Atlas 15K II is really fast.

In fact, as far as sustained reads and writes go, access times and sustained I/O, has SCSI EVER lost the top spot?

Nice ad

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how do paying subscribers feel about seeing ads before everyone else!

YAPR

[legLess]

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.

Thank you

[agrippa_cash]

Thank you Slashdot, for bringing to my attention this exciting new service or product!

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?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives.

I'm trying, but really the VGA plug won't fit the IDE connector. I'm so confused...

Anonymous Coward posts Slashvertisement

[Yahweh Doesn't Exist]

nothing to see here.

desktop hard drives are quite possibly the most boring technology possible, except maybe non-wireless network cards. who cares?

Oh puhleeese

[$RANDOMLUSER]

A 3-platter 8.9mS seek-time 7200 RPM drive with a 16MB cache? You better use this puppy for video files, 'cause the only thing that's more tuned for sequential access is a tape drive.

File this under "Ads that matter".

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

Meta-Comments

[TubeSteak]

1. I don't like the warranty
2. I've had bad experiences with WD drives
3. I've had great experiences with WD drives
4. 250 GB isn't really 250 GB*
5. This review isn't comparing similar drives
6. My RAID array is faster
7. RAID-0 isn't really redundant

And my quick summary of the aritcle:
$125 (50 cents per GB)
SATA
Not the fastest drive on the market

*In this case, the formatted drive really does hold 250 GB

Slashvertisement.

[imsabbel]

Its getting more and more annoying...
So this drive is great... says WD.
So obviously is MUST be great.

And i really like reading that it has a 16" monster cock... ^h^h^h^h^h^..^h 16Mbyte monster cache. You can really feel the journalistic integrity OOZING out between the letters. I mean, thats SOO great considering that currently my windows uses 360Mbyte as file cache, connected with 6.4Gbyte/s.

And a 250Gbyte drive is SOOOO revolutionary. I mean, thats the smell of the future. Almost as if we were already in the 3rd millenium.... oh wait, we ARE there, and drives of this size have been around for 2.5years+ already.

And Sata-2 transfer limits are SOOOO useful as a dazzling number when your drive barely reaches 70Mbyte on the outermost tracks for the first Gbyte.

Where have you been living, in a bubble?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

From TFA

[SteWhite]

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.

Submitter is kind of clueless?

[hklingon]

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.