Seagate Claims 2.5" SCSI Drive is World's Fastest

theraindog writes "Seagate has announced a 2.5" SCSI hard drive that spins at an astounding 15,000RPM. The Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" hard drive with a 15K-RPM spindle speed, but what's more interesting is that Seagate claims it's the fastest hard drive on the market. Indeed, the drive boasts an impressive 2.9ms seek time, which is more than half a millisecond quicker than that of comparable 3.5" SCSI drives. The Savvio 15K also features perpendicular recording technology and a claimed Mean Time Between Failures of 1.6 million hours."

Comments

Breaking the bottleneck

[cpearson]

They just keep chipping away at that Von Neumann bottleneck.

http://vistahelpforum.com/

Re:Breaking the bottleneck

[macadamia_harold]

The term "von Neumann bottleneck" was coined by John Backus in his 1977 ACM Turing award lecture. According to Backus: "Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.

So that's where Ted Stephens got his analogy. I had no idea he was such a fan of the Turing awards.

Re:laptop use?

[morgan_greywolf]

Generally speaking, Seagate's Savvio line of HDDs are intended for server and enterprise storage (read: SAN/NAS) use, not for laptop use. 2.5" hard drives are particularly useful in some compact storage arrays or in blade servers. They probably consume wayyyy to much power for your average laptop. Also, most laptops don't feature SCSI storage. Most use IDE or SATA. It's possible that Seagate could, in the future, come out with a SATA version of this drive, but I don't think it's likely given the power consumption and heat characteristics of 15K RPM drives. Seagates laptop drives don't even break 7.2K.

What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[Pegasus]

I have 15k rpm disks in production since ... 2002 I think. The poster should mention data per actuator figure from TFA, because that is what really matters.

Re:What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[drinkypoo]

You have 2.5" 15k RPM disks in production since 2002? Who are you? And how were you able to make such bitchin' hard drives in your mother's basement?

Re:What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[TeknoHog]

I guess what's new is the 2.5'' form factor. Smaller drives should be generally faster due to increased density, but they get a bad reputation from laptop drives with really low RPM.

Re:What's so astounding about 15k rpm?

[Agripa]

In this case, they've got many times lower capacity than even their 10k RPM 2.5" HDD, never mind their 3.5" HDDs.

One of the applications for these drives are systems that are performance limited by access time and not capacity that can not yet use solid state storage. In a lot of very large storage installations, the existing arrays are already capacity underutilized because excess spindles and actuators have to be added to lower the average access time for multiple requests. It is not uncommon to not even utilize the inner area of 3.5 inch drives because the extra capacity is not needed and doing so marginally lowers the access time for systems where this is of primary importance.

Personally, I'll wait for 3.5" HDDs with dual servos instead (basically, internal RAID), which will completely smoke this, and everything else out there.

Dual actuator drives would indeed help significantly and it has been tried however the price premium over using twice as many standard drives would seem to make it too expensive. I suspect solid state storage will become cost effective before multiple actuator drives do.

Nice, but not big news.

[Anonymous Coward]

They've had 15K RPM SCSI drives for years and years. This is no big deal.

By only using a 2.5" drive rather than 3.5 of course the average seek time is lower, because the read head doesn't have the extra 1" to cover. This is at the expense of all that extra storage area.

You could get just about as high an average seek if you partitioned up a 3.5" 15K drive and only kept data on the inner partition.

It's nice that they have these, but it's really not that super special. Why is this front page news?

BTW, your laptop is going to need some serious cooling to use this, as 15K drives do get rather warm.

Re:Nice, but not big news.

[fred fleenblat]

>> By only using a 2.5" drive rather than 3.5 of course the average
>> seek time is lower, because the read head doesn't have the
>> extra 1" to cover.

it's even more trivial than you paint. The 2.5 and 3.5 numbers
represent diameter, but the head only travels on one side of
the disk so to it the difference is only 0.5 inch as far as it
is concerned.

Re:Nice, but not big news.

[TopSpin]

This is at the expense of all that extra storage area.

The people for whom these high end disks are intended aren't concerned with the "storage area" of individual devices. They care about the ratio of storage to spindles and arms. They buy things like this.

Why is this front page news?

Because it's a site about stuff geeks want to read. It's actually rather nice to hit the page and find some news about the latest incremental change in storage, as opposed to more move-slash, dot-on politics.

Re:Nice, but not big news.

[noidentity]

"You could get just about as high an average seek if you partitioned up a 3.5" 15K drive and only kept data on the inner partition."

Wouldn't it be better to put the partition at the outer edge of the disk, where you get higher data rates and more data per cylinder (and thus less head movement to get from beginning to end of the partition)?

How many seek/ECC errors does it give??

[madhatter256]

I don't know about you, but every single Seagate HDD I've tested, both brand new and used give a lot of seek errors way above the SMART margin if you run SpinRite 6.0. I've experienced Seagate HDDs simply failing because of too many logged seek/ECC errors and Windows will freeze as it initially loads. I have never seen this type of perfomance with Samsung, WD, Fujitsu (SCSI) and Hitachi HDDs. Sure, not all hard drives are perfect but in my experience, Seagates have always given me problems to the point where I simply don't recommend them anymore.

Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give??

[D4rk Fx]

I've only had 2 of more than 12 WD drives die; one was because it fell while running from more than 8 feet off the ground, the other was insufficient cooling. I've had 5 of 6 Maxtors die, and I'm 4/4 with IBM drives deaths. 0/4 for Seagate, but they are my most recent acquisition.

You're right, everyone has stories. I have 2 4 drive WD arrays that have been around for 3 and 2 years, no failures there. But I wouldn't trust any data to an IBM or a Maxtor drive.

Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give??

[WuphonsReach]

And the flip side, I've owned close to 2 dozen IBM Deskstar drives (mostly 72-80GB). No more then a handful died before their warranty period expired.

Most of those deaths were directly related to heat issues (poor cooling or poor airflow). Some were undetermined cause.

From my experience over the past decade, heat is the #1 killer. Some makes / models are better at dealing with 50C+ temperatures then others. Maxtors seemed to be a bit sensitive to anything above 50C (and Maxtor drives were a real PITA to RMA, IBM RMAs were a simple click-click-click on a web form prior to send it back).

Nowadays, I simply plan for failure (RAID1 across 3 drives or RAID10 w/ hot-spare) along with backups. I try to keep drives at or below 40C and I keep enough airflow across them that their operating them doesn't change by more then 5C between idle/active.

Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give??

[D4rk Fx]

I completely agree that heat is the #1 killer. Yes, drives will run hot, but they will last a lot longer if they run cool. Last I checked, none of the drives I run now were hotter than 30C. I haven't had any significant drive deaths in a few years. I had one that seemed like it had firmware issues, as it would just stop responding on occasion, but would be fine when the power was re-applied.
On a side note, the hard disk in my laptop thinks that the Min/Max temps it's seen while operating is 52C/65528C. Now why the manufacturer would have used an unsigned 16 bit integer to track temperature escapes me...
KEEP YOUR DRIVES COOL, PEOPLE!

Re:How many seek/ECC errors does it give??

[Emetophobe]

And here is some anecdotal evidence to counter your claim that Western Digital drives suck.

I have 4 250gig WD SATA drives (all model WD2500KS). I've had 2 of them for a year and not a single issue. Recently I bought two more and I've had them set up in a RAID0 array for the past 3 months without any problems. I use Acronis True Image just in case, but I haven't had to restore any images yet... IMO, these western digital drives are great, they are fast and quiet, and they cost less than $90 a piece.

One major problem I've seen is people with crappy power supplies causing hard drive corruption. If your power supply isn't able to keep your hard drive(s) powered correctly, you can have corruption, blue screens of death, etc.. It's pretty important to have a good PSU that delivers stable power across all rails. A bad power supply won't be able to keep your drives powered at all times, causing data loss, etc..

Re:wow

[pe1chl]

Before you think that this means it has a lifetime of 182 years: this is not the case. The definition of MTBF is not related to lifetime.

Omission from TFA

[Timesprout]

The laptop holding the drive was itself spinning at 5000 RPM to achieve this figure, which makes it slightly difficult to use.

Re:Omission from TFA

[Hao Wu]

Spinning your computer equipments that fast would cause serious damage to components. It would not work anymore, and using it would be virtually impossible.

I think it is implausible that it was really spinning as fast as you say.

the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[dgerman]

This is insane. The edge of the plate travels 3km a minute:

2.5 inches diameter => ~20cm perimeter at 15k RPMs => 3km/Minute => 50m/s => 180 km/hr.

Re:the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[Qzukk]

For the metrically challenged among us, 180km/hr is 12025769.5 rods per fortnight, or really, really fast.

Re:the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[KonoWatakushi]

That's nothing; in terms of rotating things, flywheel batteries are much more interesting. They have achieved a velocity of 2km/s at the edge. (about Mach 6)

Take a look at http://www.llnl.gov/str/pdfs/04_96.2.pdf

Re:the edge of the plate spins 50 meters a second!

[Hoi Polloi]

As a person with an astronomy background I prefer to use parsecs/hr (0.000000000005833401930 pec/hr)

Re:1.6 million hours?

[drinkypoo]

It's seizegate, so the warranty is five years.

Re:laptop use?

[Beer_Smurf]

PowerBook Duo used SCSI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_Duo
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powerbook_du o/stats/mac_powerbook_duo210.html

Re:Moving disks are old SSD is in

[KonoWatakushi]

You do realize that the SSD you reference is based on flash, right? If you look carefully, you will find that no vendors list write seek times or write IOPS for such devices. The reason is that the performance is just plain awful.

RAM based SSD is nice, but flash based SSD won't touch a decent 15k drive for any write heavy application.

Re:laptop use?

[vought]

I'm not sure Serial Attached SCSI is going to work in your Duo/PowerBook 100 series. Kickass as they were, adding a disk drive designed and manufactured twelve years after the last Duo was already discontinued isn't going to help you put off that Mac Book purchase for any longer.

(And yes, I know about the PowerBook 150 and it's IDE drive. Shut up.)

Re:Why the low capacity?

[D4rk Fx]

The increased rotational speeds dictate that they must use smaller diameter platters, or risk the platters exploding because of the increased centripetal forces exerted.

Re:SAS is a little disappointing

[ErMaC]

SAS is not designed to be used by a SATA controller. If you wanted your cheapo SATA controller to work with SAS drives, it wouldn't be a cheapo controller. The difference between SAS and SATA is that SAS uses SCSI as its command language, which requires a whole different set of logic on the controller end.
If you're a workstation user looking for a speed boost, then you use SCSI or SAS drives with a proper controller like workstations have since 1990.

And Flash drives have almost no chance of penetration in the server market, which is where this drive is being targeted (not at Laptop or Workstation users). Don't let the 2.5" form factor make you think it's for laptops, it's for high density servers or blades.

Re:Moving disks are old SSD is in

[jdgeorge]

You do realize that the SSD you reference is based on flash, right? If you look carefully, you will find that no vendors list write seek times or write IOPS for such devices. The reason is that the performance is just plain awful.

RAM based SSD is nice, but flash based SSD won't touch a decent 15k drive for any write heavy application.

The reason "seek time" isn't listed for SSD devices is the same reason dynamic RAM manufacturers don't list "seek time" in their device specifications, namely, it doesn't apply. In storage device parlance "seek time" refers to the time it takes for the drive head to reach the target data on a rotating disk. Read the (ahem) authoritative Wikipedia article here.

Furthermore, the recently announce flash-based SSD's from Samsung and SanDisk have file access times far superior to any rotating disk-based storage device. However, it is true that the dynamic RAM-based devices have access times that are approximately 10 times faster than the flash-based devices, but the flash based devices have file acces times typically much more than 10 times faster than a disk drive's seek time. For reference, see the SanDisk press release for their SSD device.

SAS is about more than speed

[tppublic]

You don't see a reason to switch, because the benefits of SAS are in reliability, not in speed. The mechanism inside an enterprise drive is different than that in a consumer drive, and you can see that in the reliability specs and the warranty periods. Given that most consumer data really isn't mission critical (as much as people claim it is), RAID 1 SATA drives are sufficient.

Seagate Research presented a good technical article on SCSI vs. SATA back in 2003. Much of this is still relevant today (though it's SAS vs. SATA)

Re:wow

[norton_I]

MTBF is only defined within the drives expected life (something like 3 or 5 years). So, if you take 182 drives, you expect about 5 of them to die within 5 years, even if all of them die within 10 years.

Re:15k rpm -- old, OLD news

[Anonymous Coward]

you are wrong... your figure is hundreds of inches/hour, not km/hour. 3.5" * pi * 2.54 = ~28cm circumference. *15000 = 4.2e5 cm/min. /100 = 4.2e3 m/min. /1000 = 4.2 km/min. *60 = 251 km/hour. the edge velocity for a 3.5" as compared to a 2.5" drive is simply the ratio of their diameters.

Re:laptop use?

[dreamlax]

Most use IDE or SATA.

I think you mean PATA or SATA. IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics and simply means that the controller for the hard drive is on-board, and requires a suitable host. PATA and SATA are simply two different for the host to communicate with an IDE drive.

We are used to equating IDE and PATA because PATA was the only widespread method of connection between the host and the drive. So while we all understand what you imply by saying "IDE or SATA", it is more correct to say "PATA or SATA". In fact the term PATA was coined only after the invention of SATA.

Re:Why the low capacity?

[rrohbeck]

Can anyone explain to me why SCSI drives always seem to be lagging IDE in terms of capacity? The main limitation for bit density on a high speed drive is the channel data rate (since you can't use anything but standard CMOS in a low power, high volume, low margin product.) If you spin faster, at a given maximum bit rate, you lose bit density. Also, for faster seeks, you have to put down more servo information (otherwise you may not see any servo bursts for some time while the head is crossing only data.)
You can generally stuff more data on a platter by spinning it slower. That's why basic 2.5" drives usually spin at 5400 or even 4500 rpm.
Of course the interface has nothing to do with it. SCSI=>high end=>faster=>lower capacity. This may actually change with the convergence between SATA and SAS.

Faster Porn?

[chromozone]

http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/magazines/fortune/ obrienseagate.fortune/index.htm "Not so with Bill Watkins, the mercurial, salty-mouthed Texan who runs the $15 billion hard-drive king Seagate Technology. At a San Francisco dinner on Tuesday evening, he was candid about his company's ultimate mission: "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn."

Re:SAS is a little disappointing

[dfghjk]

SAS stole the entire physical interface from SATA and was deliberately implemented to allow combination SAS/SATA controllers. Saying that SAS isn't designed to be used by a SATA controller shows a total lack of understanding in the matter.

SCSI doesn't offer any "speed boost" over ATA either and SAS is certainly not faster than SATA. It's the devices that may or may not be faster.

Finally, solid state storage has been used to accelerate server apps for decades.

This is apparently not your area of expertise.

Re:Flash Drives

[drsmithy]

What do you mean? I fully expect that rotating drives are on their way out. There's too many advantages to flash and the disadvantages with using SSDs in a server environment are being worked out as_we_speak. I'm willing to wager that within 3 years SSDs will beat high end HDDs in every desirable metric sans price- and price is just a matter of time.

I doubt SSDs are going to come within a bull's roar of magnetic media in terms of cost-effectiveness any time soon (if they ever do).

What I *can* see, is the growing use of flash [drives] as an intermediate caching device - in SANs/NASes (eg: each physical array comes with an SSD for caching purposes), individual drives (the drives with flash RAM that have been talked about recently), some magic device that plugs in between the regular drives and the disk controller and the poor-man's DIY version at the OS level (eg: Vista's "ReadyBoost").

I can also see them being used in small scale, very specific tasks (eg: DB transaction logs).

But, flash completely - or even meaningfully - replacing magnetic media in the forseeable future ? No way. It just can't provide sufficient density at a reasonable cost. Price out a 500G (usable) array of flash disk. Even being generous and using a parity-based RAID scheme where you only need n+1 or n+2 disks is still going to have a cost vastly in excess of an array of regular disks (and potentially requiring more physical space as well).