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

immovable object?

[seeker_1us]

I wonder if these really fast hard disks will have to be kept stationary. More specifically: I wonder if conservation of angular momentum (manifested, for example, in gyroscopic precession) becomes a real issue if any torques were put on a spinning disk.

Re:immovable object?

[Z00L00K]

Even though they are intended to be used in server hardware where they are going to be kept stationary you will also be able to find users that are going to use them in their home computers or in servers that are on the move.

This means that the gyro effects are worth to consider. Also considering my experience from WD disks I'm not sure that I would want to use them for anything reliable.

For a solution where speed is important but the data itself can be re-created or of less critical value they can be OK.

Solid State

[c0d3r]

I'm wondering why they are still going in this direction, as hard drives are the slowest part of a computer. Why hasn't a solid state / flash ram approach taken over? Is it feasible to have a hybrid solid state/mechanical solution?

Re:Solid State

[maynard]

If you want to go RAMDISK, you're better off buying an 8 or 16 DIMM slot motherboard and installing 32GB or 64GB of physical RAM on the host itself. The the main system bus is far faster than pcie. Use LVM to snapshot and then backup your RAMdisks to physical disk at regular intervals. Put /usr, your SQL DBs, and any other dynamic data in RAM and enjoy just silly performance. Works great in combination with Xen.

And don't forget your dual redundant power supplies and a good working UPS.

Add heads?

[macemoneta]

It seems strange to continuously up the rotation speed, adding noise, vibration, heat and shortening the life of the drive. Why not just add another set of heads on the opposite side of the drive? You get many of the same benefits - increased sustained transfer rate, but also reduce the seek and latency. To maintain the form factor, reduce the size of the platters (use 2.5" drive platters in a 3.5" drive).

Re:Add heads?

[BronsCon]

I had this same idea, actually, only I thought to have 4 sets of heads, rather than just two.

I also thought of arranging what would essentially be two 2.5" disks in a 3.5" enclosure. These could either act as a stripe for faster, higher capacity data storage, or as mirrors of each other, providing redundancy at the cost of speed and capacity. If the drives in your RAID stripe are mirroring themselves, you needn't worry about mirroring your RAID stripe, no?

Re:Add heads?

[Detritus]

CDC's hard drive division did this years ago. They were later acquired by Seagate. The drives were too expensive for the improvements in performance and were discontinued. It isn't only a set of heads, it's another positioner assembly and a large amount of duplicated electronics. That's more power, heat, PCB space.

Re:Add heads?

[frieko]

Modern hard drives can only read from one head at a time. The tracks are packed in such that thanks to uneven thermal expansion, only one track will be lined up under a head at any given time. But two sets of heads might work as gp suggested.

Re:Add heads?

[ka9dgx]

Each set of heads would have its own servo, so the small variations in distance due to expansion of the case wouldn't matter. I agree that reading from one head at a time is a limitation that has to be lived with, and always will be.

More Parallelism

[Doc Ruby]

the new drives are speculated to be offering lower capacity as a tradeoff for faster seek and write times

How about if they make drives with very thin platters, but stack them up into individually addressable bit slices of the bytes they store? Then the time to read a single bit from the rotating media could read an entire byte, reassembled in the logic.

Or if the platters can't be that thin, how about sacrificing some storage capacity for say 2x2 platters, which could give 4x parallelism.

That parallel access might stave off competition from solid state drives for a couple extra years.

Kenwood TrueX...?

[RudeIota]

Remember those? It kind of reminds me of the multi-head idea you have. Perhaps one of the differences (I think) is that the actual head assembly moved too, to compensate for the disc itself not being able to rotate faster (discs have the potential to shatter above the usual max speeds on current optical drives). I remember seeing a drive rated at 72X back in early 2000.. maybe even 99.. I don't feel like digging up a link though.

They were fast and quiet, but I don't think they make them anymore. I remember the reviews being favorable too, but they were a bit expensive (not outrageously so, IMO).

linear speed

[Anonymous Coward]

A 2.5" platter at 20,000 RPM has a linear speed at its outer edge of 257 km/hr (160 miles/hr). Yeah, that's moving along at a pretty nice clip.

Re:Western Digital? Oh good!

[bigstrat2003]

Bad luck? I've never had a problem with WD, I swear by 'em. One of us is having unusual luck, and I'd prefer to think it's you. ;)

Maxtor, on the other hand... I lost count of how damned many Maxtor drives I've seen die. Single most failure-prone drive manufacturer I've come across. Everyone else, I see a dead drive here and there, nothing serious, but Maxtor is obscene.

The real future

[caliburngreywolf]

HP has the patent on the memsistor...which is set to revolutionize memory/storage in a big way. Imagine packing a computer away for 2 years, then turning it on, and in half a second, the youtube video you had buffered begins playing. Hard drives will always need to spin up.