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Hard Drive Overclocking Competition From Secau

Posted by timothy on from the spit-it-out dept.

Blittzed writes "We were reminiscing about the good old days of overclocking CPUs and memory, and the subject of hard drive overcloking came up. The discussion / argument we were having in the research lab ended up in a bet which now has to be settled. So, we are putting our money where our mouth is, and putting up $10,000 to anyone who can read a 500GB drive in under an hour. We will also consider other attempts with a smaller amount of money in the event that the one hour is not possible. There are a few rules (e.g. the drive still needs to work afterwards), but otherwise nothing is ruled out. Specific details can be found on the URL. Go let the white smoke out!"

26 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. First Post by Niedi · · Score: 2

    And the link is dead already? That was quick...

    1. Re:First Post by wizzy403 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Someone let the white smoke out...

    2. Re:First Post by eharvill · · Score: 4, Funny

      We have a new pope already??

      --
      At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
    3. Re:First Post by Magic5Ball · · Score: 2

      Because some of us work with multi-TB scratch data on our workstations, and it it would be really nice not to have use do disk arrays to approach even one gigabyte per second, especially when even low-end memory and CPU busses can handle data at several times that rate.

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    4. Re:First Post by jimicus · · Score: 2

      I'm failing to grok this. My two year old Velociraptor can sustain something close to 138MB/s transfer with no tweaking (the speed needed to read 500GB in an hour).

      Is there really no enterprise-level drive that can manage this...?

      I'm hazarding a guess here, but I suspect that sustained transfer rate is for contiguous data - and even then it sounds a little high. As soon as you have to move the head to read the data (because large contiguous reads are really rare), you can expect to see the sustained rate plummet like a suicidal lemming.

    5. Re:First Post by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      But then you should be dealing with SSDs or Raptors. In the end it doesn't change the fact that unlike CPUs and GPUs and RAM where you are just pushing electrons through silicon with a HDD you are dealing with a mechanical device that has been built and testing for a certain rotational speed with a certain MTBF and by pushing that you are in essence redlining your car and hoping the engine doesn't blow.

      So it doesn't make any sense. With GPU, CPU and RAM you can use better cooling to drop the temp and allow more electrons through without damage. No matter what kind of fins you add with a HDD you still aren't gonna get close enough to that motor to matter and you are already talking 10,000RPM on a performance drive. There is a GOOD reason why we don't see 20,000RPM drives and that is because we are already at the limit and increasing spin is simply gonna add instability and increase risk of failure.

      And how many other than you use Multi-TB scratch drives? I bet its a teeny tiny niche at best. Not to mention if you are running machines that actually need multi-Tb scratch drives then I bet you have the money for 15k RPM drives or SSDs as machines running that much data through them are making serious $$$ for a company. So in the end this just doesn't make a lick of sense. It can't in any real way be used practically as it increases the risk of failure too much so at best you can say its a "for shits and giggles" test like running your AMD quad on liquid helium to reach 7.6GHz. Sure it might be impressive for a few seconds but it isn't like you are gonna use it for anything worth doing, now is it?

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  2. Perhaps instead of such a large prize... by Aranykai · · Score: 2, Funny

    They should have considered spending some of it to upgrade their hosting.

    --
    If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
  3. An hour? by hawguy · · Score: 5, Funny

    An hour!? I have a 500GB drive on my desk and I can read it in under a minute! The first line says: "Seagate Barracua 7200.11 500 Gbytes" The entire label has only a few dozen words and serial numbers.

    1. Re:An hour? by Dunbal · · Score: 4, Funny

      With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    2. Re:An hour? by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

      With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.

      I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.

    3. Re:An hour? by jamesh · · Score: 5, Funny

      With a Seagate Barracuda I think the challenge is getting the thing to actually run for over a minute.

      I just ran smartcl here and the two Seagate Barracudas in this machine have each been running for 29,908 hours.

      I see what you're saying... even the SMART data is corrupt.

    4. Re:An hour? by Freultwah · · Score: 2

      You won't be able to push any more than 18 gigabytes in a minute through SATA-II and that's in theory. So theoretically one could read a 500 GB drive in ~28 minutes, but the drives just aren't nowhere near as fast. Then again, maybe your Barracua is many fold faster than Barracudas. I know my Sonny cassette player was faster than that from Sony.

    5. Re:An hour? by Luckyo · · Score: 2

      I can top this with my old 2x 200GB seagate barracuda 7200.7 drives. Used to be used together in raid0 on my old machine, now been in use as separate drives (one as system drive).

      They're yet to cause problems, unlike several other brands I had to kick into the curb while these two lived. Their power on time is reported as 43092 and 45394 hours respectively by S.M.A.R.T.

      You're probably talking about that specific failure in barracuda family, 7200.11. I had one of those, and had the typical problem (logic board dies). Exchanged it on warranty, they sent back a similar size 7200.12. No problems with that one either.

    6. Re:An hour? by SharpFang · · Score: 2

      The problem is not the old disks. Actually, the older, the more reliable. It's the newest disks that are the worst. When you boast "My disk is running fine for 5 years already" you're talking about a disk from 5 years ago. And it's the disks from 2 years ago that keep dying on us. Tollerances get

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      45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
    7. Re:An hour? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Not really as during the life of the disk it will remap failing sectors to some spare unused blocks that are kept specially for that purpose. Once it runs low on spare blocks it will generate a SMART warning, and when it runs out you are screwed. The more hours the drive has on it the fewer spare blocks it is likely to have left.

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  4. Hmm... by screwzloos · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't get it. 500GB in an hour would be about 140MB per second (yes, I am rounding up). Most of the enterprise level 15K drives are right in that range without any overclocking, with a couple well above that. Do I win ten grand for buying a Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 for $450 and bringing it in to show that it works?

    http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/enterprise-hard-drive-charts-2010/Throughput-Read-Average,2156.html

    No, I didn't look at the page. It's Slashdotted.

    1. Re:Hmm... by mariushm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's about 132 MB/s actually - remember, it's multiples of 1000, not 1024 and then some space is used by the file system.

      Anyway, it's not clear what they want just from the description here on Slashdot. Read the labels of the drive? But seriously, one could get a 2 TB drive or whatever drive has the most density these days and make it show up as 500GB drive... I believe it's called http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html

    2. Re:Hmm... by a_nonamiss · · Score: 4, Informative

      Is that 15k RPM drive a "Western Digital Caviar Black 3.5" SATA 500GB hard drive (WD5002AALX)." It's stated pretty clearly in the rules that it needs to be that model. I don't think they're going for a speed test here, because there are plenty of SSDs that blow that speed away. They're trying to take a "normal" drive and super-speed it, for forensic purposes.

      --
      -Arthur
      Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
    3. Re:Hmm... by Cramer · · Score: 2

      In all modern IDE/SATA drives, the firmware is stored on the plater, not in an eeprom. And for most manufacturers, it's not field accessable. Plus there's zero documentation for the firmware / internal processor(s) outside of the manufacturer's labs. (and maybe the company making the chips.) Hacking the firmware is beyond the reach of anyone who would be wowed by a $10k prize.

  5. Done already! by allanw · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://www.afrotechmods.com/hdoc.htm

  6. Re:Is that all? by a_nonamiss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    According to the rules, it needs to be reversible. They mention forensics, so maybe they're trying to do it undetected. At any rate, I'm pretty sure cracking the seal on the hard drive is verboten.

    --
    -Arthur
    Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
  7. Re:Fizzzzzzttt by blair1q · · Score: 4, Funny

    Maybe that's what they mean.

    "If you can get anything off our 500 GB drive in the next hour, we'll give you $10K."

  8. Re:Is that all? by tibit · · Score: 2

    Head preamps are usually somewhere on the arm assembly, and they drive controlled impedance differential pairs, so an extra inch or two shouldn't be that big of a deal. Latency is not an issue at all, each arm would be controlled separately and they don't need to be synchronous at all.

    --
    A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
  9. Re:Is that all? by Sloppy · · Score: 3, Informative

    I always wondered why this was not done

    If you look at it the right way (translation: I'm about to break a rule) it's done all the time. It's called RAID0.

    But seriously, that tells you why it's not done: because if your really care about performance that much, you can get more performance than a multi-head-set drive and spend less money by using commodity parts. If you make a drive that works this way, no one will buy it. (Except for money laundering purposes. ;-)

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  10. do not do this by JonySuede · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is an attempt by a forensic company to crowd-source the development of a product on the cheap. I you can do this, you can make a fortune selling to the different LEAs around the world. But please don't do it, we do not need more efficient spooks.

    --
    Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
  11. IRONY by roman_mir · · Score: 2

    What is ironic is that this story precedes the one, that gives the actual reason for this one.

    It's not too saddle, is it:

    'Federal Wiretaps On The Rise'
    'Hard Drive Overclocking Competition from Secau'

    --
    You can't handle the truth.