News Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor

^QFT

i wonder whats the lifespan of sth that spins at 20k rpm......

 

Probably gonna need a counter balance to stop your desktop from spinning in place when the drive rev's up

 

To be honest we will have an idea how good they are then the WD 20K SAS drives start to turn up in servers

Kimbie

 

I don't know how many drives have died on you people. But I have run drives for years without failures. The longest running one is 8 years of regular use (i don't turn my desktops off) And i had 3 120Gigs that are still good, only got replaced cause I found cheep 250gig drive ($30 and $20 thanks to employee discounts and rebates) and I needed extra space. With the performance of HDD's right now. Capacity to me is WAY more important than performance. If a RAIDed pair of HDDs right now isn't fast enough for you, you have a serious case of ADD or a lack of patience.

 

Sounds like WD is taking the old media approach to doing business here. Sounds like it's time for them to start re-tooling their machinery in order to make the fastest and most reliable SSDs available, or else they'll end up doing the Wal-Mart thing (competing on price with sub-par products).

The future for fast is SSD - nothing they can do with a spinning disk can knock its seek times to levels anywhere near that of something with no moving parts. For lots of storage, magnetic media still has a good amount of time left - at least until memory gets really dirt cheap. They would be very wise to act accordingly.

 

when I read "20K RPM", I envisioned my old washing machine sounding like an alien craft launching into space, though I was kinda sad to see that they made the drive very quiet as I wanted to see some PCs with HDD's in them that sound like jet engines, or people sitting on top of their PC cases while they vibrated their way around the room with one arm in the air like they were riding a bull (ahh good old washing machine rodeo's).

 

Hover car or wheel?

 

I used to run my (old) system off a U160 15KRPM drive. The only time that was anywhere near "Noisy" was when it spun up. The rest of the time, the sound of the drive spinning was barely audible (In both volume and pitch stakes). Considering that the range of human hearing is 20Hz-20KHz, something spinning at 20KRPM will produce sound at 20KHz, barely audibe.

 

A lot of heat needs more cooling?

I would imagine that a 20k rpm drive generates a lot of heat? What kind of cooling would something like this use, do you need to purchase additional or exotic cooling for a hard drive?

 

if there are vibrational problems at that fast of a spindle speed.... your drive is already dead...

 

wow although very cool and I probably would buy one its kinda pointless once SSD come down in price or IBM nanowire comes to the scene

 

how fast does a gyroscope spin? on average @ least. ? they are silent. Maybe its silent to the Human ear.. since its spinning so fast the noise has moved beyond the human range? Would drive you dog nuts though lol

 

scsi drives spin at 15K, noise is not really a function of rpm but more of balance and bearings. I had to 32gig raptors which I swapped out for a 75 which I'll eventually swap out for a 150gig when I upgrade my computer. Spindles on cnc routers hit 30-40K and are pretty quiet considering the load.
While I think the raptor sounds interesting ultimately SSD will probably slowly take over in the long running (barring any other technology advances) so far the problem just is the fact of limited read write cycles associated with flash. Which means they woudln't be good for holding swap files or php databases on a high traffic server. I think SSD will take over in laptops first where the power space and ruggidness are a big asset.

wasn't there some talk about crystals structures and boron doped diamond as storage along with other out there storage mediums? I'm waiting for something trully impressive

 

i cant wait to buy my first affordable SSD, until then my 250GB maxtor will do

 

If I recall correctly most of the current SSD drives that are already in notebooks don't actually perform better than a normal HDD. Until they do then there is really no point IMO.

 

There are already several forms of non-volatile RAM in the labs with unlimited read/write cycles. In a few years time SSD will be as ubiquitous and cheap as HDD.

 

Yep, they should focus on the advantage HDDs have over SSDs, high capacity, although you can get quite high capacity SSDs, you can't get the 1TB size monsters, that and the price are about the only advantage they have currently, best to push that.

 

At 20K noise may be mostly out of the range of human hearing as too high frequancy. Your dog however will go nuts. I agree though some kind of SSD with a large DDR2 cache (several GB) would rip this to shreads.

on a side note I have a kind of fetish for last dying breath tech so might pick one up second hand in a few years time.. I particualrly love the 4 GPU card put out by voodoo and there very hard to find info on geforce 3 competitor (which was actualy viable and playing games in the last week of voodoo).

 

20K RPM!!!! Does it have VTEC?

 

Perhaps this is what the 20K stop-gap is in aid of? maybe wishful thinking.. Who knows!

WD just kicked-in, yo!