Well, the benefits of a fast hard drive may not equal the benefits of a faster, say, CPU, but I certainly noticed a difference going from a WD1000BB to a WD2000JB drive. It's all in the program loading time, and some software still takes entirely too long to load (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.)
That said, when I told FreeBSD to "build world" using a RAMdisk as its temp directory, the build sped up by roughly 30%. It's difficult to tell exactly how much it sped up, since the CVS I compiled between the two methods was two days different, but it's a good ballpark figure.
In any case, you can completely disable paging to disk in both Windows and Linux. It can make a rather large difference in Windows, since it loves to swap out programs regardless of how much RAM you have, but in Linux it makes little difference. With 512MB RAM, I have only seen Gentoo use swap once, and that was for under 100K of data. (why it bothered, I do not know.) So, that's already taken care of in Linux more or less.
As far as "Why invest in a faster hard drive rather than more memory", having more memory won't improve the speed as which programs load the first time, won't improve the speed at which you can copy files, won't increase the number of simultaneous video or audio streams your system can handle, etc. It's really a matter of what you want to improve the performance you want to improve the performance of. After you hit a certain "sweet spot" in RAM (currently I'd say 512MB), adding more doesn't really do that much for you, but adding a much faster hard drive can noticeably improve system responsiveness further. An easy/expensive test for this which I have done is to run a system with a slow hard drive and with a fast one. In my case, I tried with an ancient 3GB Western Digital Caviar and with a Maxtor Atlas 10K-3, then the fastest 10,000RPM drive.
Biiiiig difference.:)
Apologies for explaining the hierarchy to you. I didn't mean to be condescending, but you never know what you'll get on Slashdot. Besides, I think I misunderstood your point, which would be my fault.
IBM SCSI drives are generally the slowest, loudest, least reliable, hottest SCSI drives on the market. That said, $99 is dirt cheap, but you'd be happier with a fast IDE drive or a real SCSI drive, like a Maxtor Atlas 10K-3 (which are also quite inexpensive) ALso, take a look at ResellerRatings.com for TigerDirect. I wouldn't order from them...
For SCSI drives, I have found HyperMicro generally has the best prices among companies that are trustworthy, and that them, Newegg, Mwave, or Dell have the best IDE prices.
Seperate Card - Remember that the SATA controller is on a seperate card, it's not integrated into the chipset. So these number could (and probably will) change for the better when we see SATA built into the southbridge later this year (was it Grandale from Intel that will do this? I'm too lazy to look it up).
Integrated controllers have no real-world performance advantage over PCI-based other than that they do not use PCI bandwidth. PCI bandwidth is generally more than sufficient for a single (or double) drive. If integrated controllers do improve SATA performance, it will be because of tweaks in the controller design, not simply because they are integrated.
Drive Size - The drive in the review is up to 1/6th the size of some of the other drives in the review. So if you're comparing this drive you have to remember that it would perform better if it was a 160 gig drive and didn't have to work all over it's platter.SATA supports hotswap in theory, but can you hotswap today? I don't think Windows lets you, IIRCWindows 2000, at least server editions, let you hotswap SCSI drives. I imagine hotswapping SATA drives is more a matter of having the correct drivers than anything.
Linux supports hotswapping (of SCSI drives) as well, else it wouldn't be touched with aten foot pole in many server environments.
Even Windows 98 supports hotswapping to a degree. You can get an external USB or Firewire drive and hotswap them to your heart's content. Not quite the same, but not much different either.:)
If reliability is what you're looking for, I'd stay away, far, far away from WD. I don't know about you, but the *only* drives I buy now are Maxtor/Quantum (same company now). They're the only ones left that know what "reliability" means. I miss Connor... [wipe tear]
(see above)
Maxtor is certainly a good brand, but bad luck with a certain brand (see above) generally has more to do with what happened to the drive between you and the manufacturer, not the manufacture quality of the drive itself.
Conner was purchased by Seagate in February of 1992, and much of their technology carried over, helping Seagate to make the first 7200RPM and 15,000RPM hard drives.
All that said, Samsung is currently considered the most reliable brand of IDE hard drive on the StorageReview.com forums. By quite a distance. Unfortunately, Samsung drives are fairly slow and aren't as widely available, AND aren't available in the same huge sizes as many other brands.
For the ultimate in hard drive reliability, I recommend a newish Seagate SCSI drive. You'll pay for it, though.:(
Focus on improving reliability, not increasing rotation speeds. Or just bring on those cool holographic drives - that should fix things up:-) You both must have ordered the drives from the same reseller, or at least from a reseller which mistreats drives or orders from distributers which mistreat drives.
Or they were shipped via UPS. I wouldn't trust UPS with a clothing shipment, let alone a sensitive electronic device.
Anyway, as the article says, the Raptor has a 5-yr warranty. It is targeted at server markets, much like every other 10KRPM and 15KRPM drive, and will likely be about as reliable (which is to say, extremely reliable).
About your Seagates: Seagate drives tend to be about as reliable as Maxtor, Western Digital, etc. You can check the reliability survey on Storagereview.com (as soon as the now melted server is replaced:) There are always those with bad experiences of such-and-such a brand of drive, who then often assume that the brand in general is bad. Other than certain Fujitsu and IBM drives, all recent IDE drives have relatively few problems and most are reported to have 1% return rates.
So what? An increase in heat and wear and tear on components, Not necessarily. For example, the Seagate Cheetah X15.3 is one of the coolest running drives you can own, and it's a full 15,000 RPM, yet it's cooler than many 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives. Thus, rotational speed is one of many factors determining heat.
As far as wear and tear, that same Cheetah has a 5-yr warranty and expected service life. This is from a third higher to five times higher than your IDE hard drive--which spins significantly slower.
You CANNOT do fast random access without a fast spindle speed. Right, mostly. The speed at which the heads move to the appropriate cylinder of the disk can be improved, but those heads still have to wait for the part of the drive which has the needed data to pass under them. As you can see from the Storagereview database (which you can use to list drives by access times, etc.), rotational speed is BY FAR the most important factor in determining access times.
Virtually memory was a short term hack when memory was critically limited: Nowadays you could literally disable it in most configurations.
Actually, virtual memory is still used today and has nothing to do with hard drives, though this is widely believed. Virtual memory is the ability for an operating system to tell all programs that they can address the full addressable range of the processor, that is, with 32-bit CPUs that each program has access to 4GB of RAM. It happens that many operating systems use hard disk space as a substitute for RAM when there isn't enough physical memory, but the use of hard drive space as memory is not the definition of virtual memory. I was under the same impression myself not too long ago.;)
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive You are more or less correct. DMA was actually available with a 16MB/second interface as well. IDE drives STILL use more CPU power than SCSI drives, as can be seen on the processor usage graphics on StorageReview.com, but all reviewed serial ATA drives so far use *less CPU time than SCSI Drives*. Eugene, a founder of SR, says that those depends more on the controller than anything. Apparently the serial ATA controllers tested are doing quite a good job!
Why would SCSI be less prone to heat and wear than IDE? SCSI drives are designed with higher quality parts, and are manufactured to much stricter standards. It isn't that they are SCSI, it's that they are designed to handle it. IDE drives could be build with the same standards, but it would increase the costs.
Have anybody ever actually thought about it? For the amount of extra money to blow, why not spend more for memory and have EVERYTHING run from there? what, 4G is not enough for your desktop system? x86 only addresses that much right now, ya know...
Compare the price of 4GB of RAM with a 10GB hard drive. Also note that all memory used for a RAMdisk (as disk which will vanish once power is turned off) will be unavailable to applications.
Notice that computers run on multiple tiers of increasingly large and decreasingly expensive storage. This has been found to have the best performance/cost ratio. First we have registers, then L1 cache (except for Pentium IV's), then L2 cache, then on some systems L3 cache, THEN RAM, then the hard drive. RAM is simply not cost effective for mass storage, and the performance benefits of using a RAMdrive really aren't very noticeable for many tasks. They help immensely for extremely random I/O, like running a mailserver, but Office and Diablo2 aren't going to run so much faster that it justifies the huge jump in cost and huge increase in risk (RAM drive dying when power goes out). Besides, if we used a slow hard drive to load 4GB of data into RAM, can you imagine how long booting the system would take?
That said, there are companies offering battery-backed RAMdrives which fit in a PCI slot, and there are those (Armadillo comes to mind) which offers huge, fast FLASH-RAM drives in both IDE and SCSI flavors, but they are very expensive. There's more to making one than simply collecting a bunch of DIMMS together, ya know.:)
My main concern is its actual capabilities when being used to store/delete/etc large, numerous files and how long until the hard drive finally crashes and dies out.
The Raptor has a 5-yr warranty (5 times as long as most desktop hard drives) and is targetted for the server market. Unless WD seriously screwed up, I am willing to be that it is about as reliable as other enterprise 10K drives (all of which are SCSI)--that is to say, incredibly reliable.
A 10k IDE drive is bound to have a ton of hard drive space
Actually, the faster the platter spins, the lower density each platter must be in order for the heads to keep up. For example, the Western Digital Raptor is a 36GB drive with a single 36GB platter (that's 18GB/side). This is the same size of platter as on the largest of 10KRPM SCSI drives. To contrast, the largest platter size on a 7200RPM drive is 80GB/platter (or 40GB/side), and Weste3rn Digital is about to release a 250GB drive which will have three 83.3GB platters.
Higher platter density improves speed as well, but generally speaking (VERY generally speaking), increasing rotational speed improves drive performance more than having a somewhat higher density platter. Those of course varies based on what you are doing with the drive, whether it involves lots of random accesses (mail/webserver) or lots of linear accesses (video editing) or something in between.
In general, expect higher RPM drives to trail behind lower RPM drives in platter density, and therefore in maximum available disk space.
There's no margin on a $60.00 drive. It seems to be that way, since once drives hit about the $75 mark they tend to be phased out. I find it extremely impressive that they can get that cheap at all. MaxtorSCSI, a SCSI engineer at Maxtor (funny, that), and a forum user on StorageReview.com, stated once that hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices, by far, in the average person's home. The platter has to be so flat that, spinning at thousands of RPM, the heads must float above the platter at less than 1/50 the width of a human hair, or slightly more distance than the width of an average smoke particle. And they have to survive being bumped, because if those heads touch the platters, all hell (and the heads) breaks loose.
Hardware also is hideously expensive when it first hits the shelves. Of course you are correct, but this drive is expected to be priced at $160USD, which isn't really all that bad, all things considered.
As far as reliability, the WD Raptor is targeted at servers and has a 5-yr warranty. Western Digital has experience designing SCSI drives, and I suspect that the Raptor is essentially a 10,000RPM SCSI assembly with a serial ATA--instead of SCSI--interface (as well as a few other tweaks). Certainly the mechanical characteristics appear to strongly resemble common 10,000RPM SCSI drives, such as the sub-6 millisecond access times.
Please don't quote Tom's Hardware. They are widely know as being universally full of shit, and it can make you look bad. Take a look at their RAID controller articles as a fine example.
Of course, in this particular instance they are mostly correct. There are certainly more than three methods of increasing hard disk speed as well, but THG did mention two of them.
At these speeds, would you hardware be more likely to 'burnout'?
No. As I mention above, there are 15,000RPM drives which are more reliable than any 7200RPM IDE drive on the market today. Of course, you pay for them... Even Hypermicro, a discount reseller, sells 18GB models of Seagate's X15.3 for over $200. That's 10x the cost per megabyte of a cheaper, slower, less reliable IDE drive, but that IDE drive is fast enough and reliable enough for the average user.
No. It isn't a dupe. The new/. article has a link to an actual review of the drive, not just an announcement that it happens to exist. Analog: If a story mentions that NASA has contracted for a new space vehicle, and later there is another story that covers the actual performance, mechanics, and statistics of a completed model, those two stories would be related, but not dupes.
I'd rather have something slow that I can trust, rather than something that goes out in a brillant ball of fire--even though it was really fast.
The reviewed drive has a 5 year warranty. How long is the warranty on your slower drive?
The Seagate Cheetah X15.3 is the world's fastest hard drive (until the Maxtor Atlas 15K is released). It is one of the most reliable drives you can buy, with an extremely high rating in StorageReview.com's reliability survey, and an excellent history in IBM, Dell, etc's enterprise servers.
"Slower is more reliable" doesn't hold water anymore, though it is true that early 7200 RPM IDE drives were less reliable than the slower 5400 RPM drives.
Unisys makes 32-way x86 (p3) machines designed for Windows 2000 Datacenter server. These would probably be great test machines for Linux scalability, since x86 is Linux's most mature and tested platform. Anyone want to refinance their castle?
VMS is actually more secure than OpenBSD if you stick with VMS. Most of its extremely, extremely rare serious exploits are related to its POSIX compatibility (which added "Open" to OpenVMS). Even in the rare event that an exploit is found, 99.999% of hackers and crackers will have no idea what they are doing on a VMS system, and if they do, they have any number of TCP/IP stacks to deal with (because they are commercial 3rd-party addons, not part of the OS), and most won't bother playing with VMS security since public servers based on it are as rare as diamond hen's teeth. If you'd like to try your hand at it, take a look at sisko.sbcc.cc.ca.us.
That said, the problem with VMS is that it sucks for nearly everything OpenBSD and Linux are useful for. Software for VMS is rare, and open-source software is practically nonexistant. VMS admins are rare and expensive, VMS is rare and expensive, the two whole architectures on which it runs (three shortly--Itanium added to Alpha and VAX) are rare and expensive. Try setting up a mail server and file server on VMS. Good luck. Additionally, the documentation for VMS is very thorough, as in, "oh my god, nevermind" when you see the fleets of bookshelves which store dry, nondescriptive binders which each cover an aspect of the inter-related components of the system. VMS is as different from Unix as Unix is from Windows. It isn't really worth mentioning alongside OpenBSD because the two are completely, utterly different.
[_] That your ID card be enhanced with the latest technologies, which make identity theft and fraud with your name nearly impossible, a 50% income tax break for 10 years and the privilege of being knighted by the queen, or
[_] To keep your current ID card, allow our country to fall behind the times and encourage the worlds mot notorious criminals to move here to avoid getting caught by everyone elses superior identity technology, lose your job, and be shot, or deported, or both?
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Well, the benefits of a fast hard drive may not equal the benefits of a faster, say, CPU, but I certainly noticed a difference going from a WD1000BB to a WD2000JB drive. It's all in the program loading time, and some software still takes entirely too long to load (OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc.)
:)
That said, when I told FreeBSD to "build world" using a RAMdisk as its temp directory, the build sped up by roughly 30%. It's difficult to tell exactly how much it sped up, since the CVS I compiled between the two methods was two days different, but it's a good ballpark figure.
In any case, you can completely disable paging to disk in both Windows and Linux. It can make a rather large difference in Windows, since it loves to swap out programs regardless of how much RAM you have, but in Linux it makes little difference. With 512MB RAM, I have only seen Gentoo use swap once, and that was for under 100K of data. (why it bothered, I do not know.)
So, that's already taken care of in Linux more or less.
As far as "Why invest in a faster hard drive rather than more memory", having more memory won't improve the speed as which programs load the first time, won't improve the speed at which you can copy files, won't increase the number of simultaneous video or audio streams your system can handle, etc. It's really a matter of what you want to improve the performance you want to improve the performance of. After you hit a certain "sweet spot" in RAM (currently I'd say 512MB), adding more doesn't really do that much for you, but adding a much faster hard drive can noticeably improve system responsiveness further. An easy/expensive test for this which I have done is to run a system with a slow hard drive and with a fast one. In my case, I tried with an ancient 3GB Western Digital Caviar and with a Maxtor Atlas 10K-3, then the fastest 10,000RPM drive.
Biiiiig difference.
Apologies for explaining the hierarchy to you. I didn't mean to be condescending, but you never know what you'll get on Slashdot. Besides, I think I misunderstood your point, which would be my fault.
IBM SCSI drives are generally the slowest, loudest, least reliable, hottest SCSI drives on the market. That said, $99 is dirt cheap, but you'd be happier with a fast IDE drive or a real SCSI drive, like a Maxtor Atlas 10K-3 (which are also quite inexpensive)
ALso, take a look at ResellerRatings.com for TigerDirect. I wouldn't order from them...
For SCSI drives, I have found HyperMicro generally has the best prices among companies that are trustworthy, and that them, Newegg, Mwave, or Dell have the best IDE prices.
Seperate Card - Remember that the SATA controller is on a seperate card, it's not integrated into the chipset. So these number could (and probably will) change for the better when we see SATA built into the southbridge later this year (was it Grandale from Intel that will do this? I'm too lazy to look it up).
:)
Integrated controllers have no real-world performance advantage over PCI-based other than that they do not use PCI bandwidth. PCI bandwidth is generally more than sufficient for a single (or double) drive. If integrated controllers do improve SATA performance, it will be because of tweaks in the controller design, not simply because they are integrated.
Drive Size - The drive in the review is up to 1/6th the size of some of the other drives in the review. So if you're comparing this drive you have to remember that it would perform better if it was a 160 gig drive and didn't have to work all over it's platter.SATA supports hotswap in theory, but can you hotswap today? I don't think Windows lets you, IIRCWindows 2000, at least server editions, let you hotswap SCSI drives. I imagine hotswapping SATA drives is more a matter of having the correct drivers than anything.
Linux supports hotswapping (of SCSI drives) as well, else it wouldn't be touched with aten foot pole in many server environments.
Even Windows 98 supports hotswapping to a degree. You can get an external USB or Firewire drive and hotswap them to your heart's content. Not quite the same, but not much different either.
Ahh, there aren't any graphs or pretty pictures. Guess I'll have to wait until the server is revived.
If reliability is what you're looking for, I'd stay away, far, far away from WD. I don't know about you, but the *only* drives I buy now are Maxtor/Quantum (same company now). They're the only ones left that know what "reliability" means. I miss Connor... [wipe tear]
:(
(see above)
Maxtor is certainly a good brand, but bad luck with a certain brand (see above) generally has more to do with what happened to the drive between you and the manufacturer, not the manufacture quality of the drive itself.
Conner was purchased by Seagate in February of 1992, and much of their technology carried over, helping Seagate to make the first 7200RPM and 15,000RPM hard drives.
All that said, Samsung is currently considered the most reliable brand of IDE hard drive on the StorageReview.com forums. By quite a distance.
Unfortunately, Samsung drives are fairly slow and aren't as widely available, AND aren't available in the same huge sizes as many other brands.
For the ultimate in hard drive reliability, I recommend a newish Seagate SCSI drive. You'll pay for it, though.
Focus on improving reliability, not increasing rotation speeds. Or just bring on those cool holographic drives - that should fix things up :-)
:)
You both must have ordered the drives from the same reseller, or at least from a reseller which mistreats drives or orders from distributers which mistreat drives.
Or they were shipped via UPS. I wouldn't trust UPS with a clothing shipment, let alone a sensitive electronic device.
Anyway, as the article says, the Raptor has a 5-yr warranty. It is targeted at server markets, much like every other 10KRPM and 15KRPM drive, and will likely be about as reliable (which is to say, extremely reliable).
About your Seagates: Seagate drives tend to be about as reliable as Maxtor, Western Digital, etc. You can check the reliability survey on Storagereview.com (as soon as the now melted server is replaced
There are always those with bad experiences of such-and-such a brand of drive, who then often assume that the brand in general is bad. Other than certain Fujitsu and IBM drives, all recent IDE drives have relatively few problems and most are reported to have 1% return rates.
Of course, skimming stories is unheard of on Slashdot. :)
So what? An increase in heat and wear and tear on components,
Not necessarily.
For example, the Seagate Cheetah X15.3 is one of the coolest running drives you can own, and it's a full 15,000 RPM, yet it's cooler than many 7,200 RPM IDE hard drives.
Thus, rotational speed is one of many factors determining heat.
As far as wear and tear, that same Cheetah has a 5-yr warranty and expected service life. This is from a third higher to five times higher than your IDE hard drive--which spins significantly slower.
The Raptor has that same 5-yr warranty.
You CANNOT do fast random access without a fast spindle speed.
Right, mostly. The speed at which the heads move to the appropriate cylinder of the disk can be improved, but those heads still have to wait for the part of the drive which has the needed data to pass under them. As you can see from the Storagereview database (which you can use to list drives by access times, etc.), rotational speed is BY FAR the most important factor in determining access times.
Virtually memory was a short term hack when memory was critically limited: Nowadays you could literally disable it in most configurations.
;)
Actually, virtual memory is still used today and has nothing to do with hard drives, though this is widely believed. Virtual memory is the ability for an operating system to tell all programs that they can address the full addressable range of the processor, that is, with 32-bit CPUs that each program has access to 4GB of RAM. It happens that many operating systems use hard disk space as a substitute for RAM when there isn't enough physical memory, but the use of hard drive space as memory is not the definition of virtual memory.
I was under the same impression myself not too long ago.
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive
No longer really true. Ever since UltraDMA/33 mode, the CPU has not had much work to do with an IDE drive
You are more or less correct. DMA was actually available with a 16MB/second interface as well. IDE drives STILL use more CPU power than SCSI drives, as can be seen on the processor usage graphics on StorageReview.com, but all reviewed serial ATA drives so far use *less CPU time than SCSI Drives*. Eugene, a founder of SR, says that those depends more on the controller than anything. Apparently the serial ATA controllers tested are doing quite a good job!
Why would SCSI be less prone to heat and wear than IDE?
SCSI drives are designed with higher quality parts, and are manufactured to much stricter standards. It isn't that they are SCSI, it's that they are designed to handle it. IDE drives could be build with the same standards, but it would increase the costs.
Have anybody ever actually thought about it? For the amount of extra money to blow, why not spend more for memory and have EVERYTHING run from there? what, 4G is not enough for your desktop system? x86 only addresses that much right now, ya know...
:)
Compare the price of 4GB of RAM with a 10GB hard drive. Also note that all memory used for a RAMdisk (as disk which will vanish once power is turned off) will be unavailable to applications.
Notice that computers run on multiple tiers of increasingly large and decreasingly expensive storage. This has been found to have the best performance/cost ratio. First we have registers, then L1 cache (except for Pentium IV's), then L2 cache, then on some systems L3 cache, THEN RAM, then the hard drive.
RAM is simply not cost effective for mass storage, and the performance benefits of using a RAMdrive really aren't very noticeable for many tasks. They help immensely for extremely random I/O, like running a mailserver, but Office and Diablo2 aren't going to run so much faster that it justifies the huge jump in cost and huge increase in risk (RAM drive dying when power goes out).
Besides, if we used a slow hard drive to load 4GB of data into RAM, can you imagine how long booting the system would take?
That said, there are companies offering battery-backed RAMdrives which fit in a PCI slot, and there are those (Armadillo comes to mind) which offers huge, fast FLASH-RAM drives in both IDE and SCSI flavors, but they are very expensive. There's more to making one than simply collecting a bunch of DIMMS together, ya know.
My main concern is its actual capabilities when being used to store/delete/etc large, numerous files and how long until the hard drive finally crashes and dies out.
The Raptor has a 5-yr warranty (5 times as long as most desktop hard drives) and is targetted for the server market. Unless WD seriously screwed up, I am willing to be that it is about as reliable as other enterprise 10K drives (all of which are SCSI)--that is to say, incredibly reliable.
A 10k IDE drive is bound to have a ton of hard drive space
Actually, the faster the platter spins, the lower density each platter must be in order for the heads to keep up. For example, the Western Digital Raptor is a 36GB drive with a single 36GB platter (that's 18GB/side). This is the same size of platter as on the largest of 10KRPM SCSI drives.
To contrast, the largest platter size on a 7200RPM drive is 80GB/platter (or 40GB/side), and Weste3rn Digital is about to release a 250GB drive which will have three 83.3GB platters.
Higher platter density improves speed as well, but generally speaking (VERY generally speaking), increasing rotational speed improves drive performance more than having a somewhat higher density platter. Those of course varies based on what you are doing with the drive, whether it involves lots of random accesses (mail/webserver) or lots of linear accesses (video editing) or something in between.
In general, expect higher RPM drives to trail behind lower RPM drives in platter density, and therefore in maximum available disk space.
There's no margin on a $60.00 drive. It seems to be that way, since once drives hit about the $75 mark they tend to be phased out.
I find it extremely impressive that they can get that cheap at all.
MaxtorSCSI, a SCSI engineer at Maxtor (funny, that), and a forum user on StorageReview.com, stated once that hard drives are the highest precision mechanical devices, by far, in the average person's home.
The platter has to be so flat that, spinning at thousands of RPM, the heads must float above the platter at less than 1/50 the width of a human hair, or slightly more distance than the width of an average smoke particle. And they have to survive being bumped, because if those heads touch the platters, all hell (and the heads) breaks loose.
Hardware also is hideously expensive when it first hits the shelves.
Of course you are correct, but this drive is expected to be priced at $160USD, which isn't really all that bad, all things considered.
As far as reliability, the WD Raptor is targeted at servers and has a 5-yr warranty. Western Digital has experience designing SCSI drives, and I suspect that the Raptor is essentially a 10,000RPM SCSI assembly with a serial ATA--instead of SCSI--interface (as well as a few other tweaks). Certainly the mechanical characteristics appear to strongly resemble common 10,000RPM SCSI drives, such as the sub-6 millisecond access times.
Please don't quote Tom's Hardware. They are widely know as being universally full of shit, and it can make you look bad. Take a look at their RAID controller articles as a fine example.
Of course, in this particular instance they are mostly correct. There are certainly more than three methods of increasing hard disk speed as well, but THG did mention two of them.
At these speeds, would you hardware be more likely to 'burnout'?
No. As I mention above, there are 15,000RPM drives which are more reliable than any 7200RPM IDE drive on the market today.
Of course, you pay for them... Even Hypermicro, a discount reseller, sells 18GB models of Seagate's X15.3 for over $200. That's 10x the cost per megabyte of a cheaper, slower, less reliable IDE drive, but that IDE drive is fast enough and reliable enough for the average user.
This is pretty much a dupe.
/. article has a link to an actual review of the drive, not just an announcement that it happens to exist. Analog: If a story mentions that NASA has contracted for a new space vehicle, and later there is another story that covers the actual performance, mechanics, and statistics of a completed model, those two stories would be related, but not dupes.
No. It isn't a dupe. The new
Yeah, but how long till it fries itself?
I'd rather have something slow that I can trust, rather than something that goes out in a brillant ball of fire--even though it was really fast.
The reviewed drive has a 5 year warranty. How long is the warranty on your slower drive?
The Seagate Cheetah X15.3 is the world's fastest hard drive (until the Maxtor Atlas 15K is released). It is one of the most reliable drives you can buy, with an extremely high rating in StorageReview.com's reliability survey, and an excellent history in IBM, Dell, etc's enterprise servers.
"Slower is more reliable" doesn't hold water anymore, though it is true that early 7200 RPM IDE drives were less reliable than the slower 5400 RPM drives.
Actually you're in luck: They will be available _ONLY_ with a serial ATA interface.
Unisys makes 32-way x86 (p3) machines designed for Windows 2000 Datacenter server. These would probably be great test machines for Linux scalability, since x86 is Linux's most mature and tested platform.
Anyone want to refinance their castle?
Apologies for my ignorance, as I haven't visited your country (though I want to!)
it was a joke, mind you.:)
VMS is actually more secure than OpenBSD if you stick with VMS. Most of its extremely, extremely rare serious exploits are related to its POSIX compatibility (which added "Open" to OpenVMS). Even in the rare event that an exploit is found, 99.999% of hackers and crackers will have no idea what they are doing on a VMS system, and if they do, they have any number of TCP/IP stacks to deal with (because they are commercial 3rd-party addons, not part of the OS), and most won't bother playing with VMS security since public servers based on it are as rare as diamond hen's teeth.
If you'd like to try your hand at it, take a look at sisko.sbcc.cc.ca.us.
That said, the problem with VMS is that it sucks for nearly everything OpenBSD and Linux are useful for. Software for VMS is rare, and open-source software is practically nonexistant. VMS admins are rare and expensive, VMS is rare and expensive, the two whole architectures on which it runs (three shortly--Itanium added to Alpha and VAX) are rare and expensive. Try setting up a mail server and file server on VMS. Good luck.
Additionally, the documentation for VMS is very thorough, as in, "oh my god, nevermind" when you see the fleets of bookshelves which store dry, nondescriptive binders which each cover an aspect of the inter-related components of the system. VMS is as different from Unix as Unix is from Windows. It isn't really worth mentioning alongside OpenBSD because the two are completely, utterly different.
If given the choice, would you prefer:
[_] That your ID card be enhanced with the latest technologies, which make identity theft and fraud with your name nearly impossible, a 50% income tax break for 10 years and the privilege of being knighted by the queen, or
[_] To keep your current ID card, allow our country to fall behind the times and encourage the worlds mot notorious criminals to move here to avoid getting caught by everyone elses superior identity technology, lose your job, and be shot, or deported, or both?
The other 12% chose option #2