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.

Comments

Re:Solid State

[jay-be-em]

Economics.

Is there a point to this?

[Ostsol]

Is there still really a point to huge RPMs? As data density increases, speed should increase naturally. Move over the same distance at the same speed on a drive with twice the density should mean that one has read twice the data in the same amount of time -- therefore reading speed is twice as fast, right? This should even work on low-capacity drives by simply using small, high-data-density disks.

Re:Is there a point to this?

[hedwards]

No, not right, that's assuming that the writes are being done sequentially. Hard disks are random access devices, and while they can definitely do sequential reads and writes, and quite a bit faster, as soon as the files are not next to each other or are fragmented you're going to lose that advantage.

Re:Is there a point to this?

[Detritus]

You can't just wave a magic wand and double the density. Many of these things are interrelated in a complex manner. Increased density requires new head designs, new and improved electronics, new coatings for the platters, etc.

Re:Add heads?

[vikstar]

Good idea. I for one would prefer to go solid state.

Re:Add heads?

[ka9dgx]

I'd go even further... use the old 5 1/4 "half height" form factor, stack 8 platters in it, with 4 sets of heads, spin it at 5400 rpm to keep the power requirements down to reasonable.
This would give you 8 platters * 2 sides * 400 Gbit/in^2 * 50 in^2 (estimated working area surface area per platter) ==> 40 Terabytes in a single package, with an average access time on the order of 5 millisecond, and a sustainable transfer rate of at least 300 Megabytes/Second.
Even without the 4 sets of heads, that would still be a 40 Terabyte drive!

As far as RAID goes, it's just one drive, it's all or nothing, so don't think it would count as it's own mirror.

--Mike--

Re:More Parallelism

[TubeSteak]

How about if they make drives with very thin platters,

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930

Make the blades so thin they're invisible. Put some on the handle. I don't care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!

I was going to do a full rewrite of the article, but you can do it yourself by mentally substituting "hard drive" or "platter" for "blade," "razor," or "shave"

The product will be dead on arrival

[bogaboga]

I am afraid the 20,000 rpm drive might be dead on arrival! Isn't the world "going SSD," whose advantages include faster start-up times, low read latency times, "mechanical" reliability and absolute silence while working?

Laptops have SSDs, next will be desktops increasing chances that Western Digital's product will be dead on arrival.

Re:The product will be dead on arrival

[bigstrat2003]

When SSDs have large capacities (at least 500 GB) at a comparable price per GB, then I'll consider putting one in my computer. Not before.

Re:Solid State

[omfgnosis]

It seems the long-term answer would be DRAM-based, with a battery to help mitigate corruption on power loss. Obviously older DRAM technology hasn't gone down in price/GB, but presumably that's due in part to production going down. I'd love a boot disk using old 100 MHz DRAM chips, if it could be made dependable and as affordable as flash drives.

Re:Solid State

[eelke_klein]

Maybe because western digital is a harddrive manufacturer, not a flash memory manufacturer. They do not have the know how to make flash chips they could buy them but it would be hard to compete against the manufacturers that bake their own flash memory.

Re:Seagate responds

[Enderandrew]

http://funroll-loops.info/

Paint flames on it, install Gentoo, and use --omg-optimized