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Western Digital Working On a 20,000 RPM Drive
MrKaos writes "Western Digital seems to be preparing for the onslaught of solid-state drives set to impact its market by developing a 20,000 rpm hard drive. Similar to the VelociRaptor line of drives, the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times." This report out of Taipei is the only word on the rumored WD 20K drive. It's said to be a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" enclosure, for efficiency of cooling — the arrangement the Register enjoyed poking fun at when the 10K drive was upgraded last month.
Well, that would add to the number of components that could fail, and require a high speed bus between the two controllers, as well as a shared cache and all the headaches that would bring with it (think SMP caches being ping-ponged). Then you've got to sync your interface to the system bus as well as the new internal buses. On the other hand, you can just crank the knob up to 11 and go 20K RPMs on known, tried and true, technology.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
The higher speed drives aren't so much for their sequential transfer rates by themselves, but their random seek rates. They are trying to get high I/O per second rates (IOPS), which is what a lot of servers need to be at their peak.
The smaller diameter / mass will tend to reduce bad effects from conservation of angular momentum.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Connor actually did this right around the time 3.5" drives started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conner_Peripherals#Performance_issues_and_the_.22Chinook.22_dual-actuator_drive
It could read from either set of heads, but I believe could only write from one set. Writes can be posted in a write-behind buffer, so this didn't impact performance.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You don't get +5 Funny for "getting your science right".