News Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor

To be honest, having spent the morning over at XtremeSystems reading posts by people who chase maximum bandwidth at all costs, I'm sure this'll do quite well. People are incredibly uneducated and stupid when it comes to hard disks, and bigger numbers make people think it's better, even if it isn't.

Personally I don't see why anyone desires anything faster than a fast high capacity disk, they're damn fast and untill SSD is everywhere you're not really going to do that much better by spending an extra few hundred on a low capacity high speed disk.

 

i can not see something that spins at that speed being silent and the vibration must be amazing

 

From the top of my head

They are sensitive to radiation.

No, the SLC are fast. Most MLC are crap. Write speed is quite bad. And a comparison between a Samsung SSD and Fujitsu HD http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram.html

Small drives are. The problem is that the consumption increase linearly with capacity, while on HD it raises per platter

Until a threshold is reached. That's silicon, you just can't make them much cheaper. Density will increase, but newer processes are more expensive.

Proof? Link?

For now? Wishful thinking IMO

- SSD can also have electronic problems
- They are very sensitive to write fragmentation
- Professional data recovery is not possible. Even more due to wear leveling
- Wasteful , too small and/or very slow for ISO files, videos, installation packages, hi res pictures, Temp, Temporary internet files, Pagefile, Hibernation file and so on.
- Where is the proof that consumer grade SSD's will have high quality, reliability, and support a large number of write cycles? Or is this based on claims from manufacturers?
- Some manufacturers are packaging cheapo MLC flash and calling them SSD. I'm talking about deceiving advertising


Hard Drive:

Not an issue. Samsung F1, Velociraptor, WD 6400AAKS, Green power.

Same

Not an issue for desktops. Laptops and servers, yes.

Laptops: Agree, but see above, considering large SSD. And you must consider all the components of a laptop
Desktops: Don't you have a car? Don't you use a 1000W heater in the winter? Don't you turn on the lights?
Servers: TCO is THE metric, not fashion or bandwagons.

Agreed. You must be careful selecting the hard drive. But then again, I'd like to see a 1000€ worth of proof that SSD have a long life cycle

Huh?

That's why they are 15x cheaper p/GB ...

On some scenarios they are massively faster, on most are a tad slower.

No I won't

Some more SSD disadvantages, or at least half-truths:

- Superfetch mitigates the problem of random reads on HD. So what's the point? It can't do anything about the horrible random writes performance of the SSD. If you have Vista, a PC with SSD will boot faster and that's it.

- SSD prices are coming down, but so are HD's. I can buy a 500GB disk for 75€

- HD's are known to have high failure rates, but SSD doesn't avoid the most common reasons why you lose important data: filesystem corruption, virus, human error like deleting files, application bugs, memory errors that corrupt system cache.

- If I pay 600€, I don't want any compromise, if I pay high end, I want high end.

 

And how many of us live in a city that has the radiation level of Pripyat (near Chernobyl) let alone enough radiation to do anything to the data on a solid state drive?

 

Does sound a big jump in rpm . . . but so long as they can balance it precisely enough it should be very smooth . . . . but as rpm increases so do high frequency vibrations and they can decrease life of the whole pc, not just the hard drive itself.

Agree with concensus though, that surely ssd is the way to go.

 

If this had come out a year ago if would have been fine but why waste your time with old/dead tech



they should be spending there time doing more porductive things

 

HOLY LORD! Time to get rid of RAM and have some bad ass paging file (yer yer, joke)

 

I think you'll find that SSDs aren't quite as ready for mainstream as you think: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000-19.html

(note: I'm currently a big raptor fan. I don't have a velociraptor, but I have both a 74 and 150 "regular" raptor)

When I can buy an SSD with a useful capacity and a reasonable price, I certainly will.

Useful capacity = enough to install games on, but doesn't need to house movies or music. 64GB would probably do it, but I'd prefer 128.

Reasonable price = not much more than a raptor. I'm going to cite US dollars, though I know you guys hafta pay more across the pond. (sorry!) I'll assume that the relative price is consistent (ie the whole world pays twice as much for X than for Y, though the price of each varies around the world) The 150GB raptor is ~$170 USD right now, and the veloci 300GB is ~$300. The only SSD Tom's recommended in the above-linked article was the Samsung, which is at $400 for 32GB and $800 for 64. That's small enough that I can have only a few games installed at once.

My point is that depending on where SSD price and performance stand when this 20k rpm drive becomes available, the 20k drive may very well be worth it!

 

I wonder how easy or difficult SSD are to RAID. Hmmmm!!!

 

Use smaller platters.

 

this is to response from here;

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/06/western-digital-working-on-20-000-rpm-raptor/1

there just is not enough room to put this there




Today there is­ ­not really a reason to worry about SSD speeds. Unless it is based on current RAM, there is no point! It's just not competitive outside niche markets and military and heavy duty industrial use. And for that matter how fast your storage subsystem really is being based of traditional Hard disk drives and how your system or OS currently utilizes it's system Resources. For most people who demand nothing but speed, A live Linux distro loaded completely to RAM will give you a taste of what it is like to run from the very best SSD Based storage systems (I am talking about the same stuff that's on your mobo and the high end stuff Texas Instruments makes for the government that uses REAL DDR-RAM) Todays typical computer will take 16-32 GB of ram. 64-128 on servers.

Considering that most people can make due with a 40 gig HD, a system with 32 gigs of RAM could hold all programs in active memory. Considering that the OS can be made to run the memory in a raid 1 fashion but without the bottle necks of the traditional Hard Disk system. I Don't think any user will ever feel that there is any reason to switch over to SSD's of any nature if we take advantage of the RAM space available on board. (Assuming the OS knows what to load to the memory space in the first place to optimize for performance of applications the user wants to use NOW)

Traditionally old computers loaded everything to RAM in the first place. This made the old Dinosaurs really fast in comparison to there newer and newer brethren. The trend became to make bigger and bigger programs with the RAM of these systems playing catch up. (Bigger hard drives are cheaper to make then bigger memory chips) Because of this, the computer is now designed to load things from the HDD and run them of the HDD's (And only loads the minimal amount of what is needed or the BASE PROGRAM! ) It is this software design that has made the computer "slow". And because of the limited RAM, there is no way to load an entire program to RAM anymore effectively without casing troubles for other systems and programs as well.

If I was a consumer, I would be looking for a computer that can handle at least 32 gigs of RAM and say hello to a striped RAID array. Your RAID system need not be new either. Especially if you are installing the OS on it and using it for that purpose only. Old SCSI 2 and 3 HDD's @ 10K-RPM in a hardware stripped configuration of 14 drives will get you to about 5 m sec avg seek times, transfer rates respectable to 40-50 Mega-Bytes (or like ~35 3.5" floppy disks per second SUSTAINED! , not to mention the data protection of a RAID (1,3,5,10,etc) & cost's of $100 bucks if you shop smart!

RAM has always been the big cost issue in any system and is the number one thing that people should spend there money on and DON'T!!!
In order to max out your RAM, you have to buy the bigger chips that cost more money, or get a board that has allot more slots to accommodate more RAM. The only computers out there that are made to hold all this memory cheaply and effectively is server boards. many have 16 RAM slots and some even more. this way getting to a 16-32 or even 64 GB limit is even less expensive and more attainable. today 2 gigs of RAM cost 20 bucks on sale. 4 gig sticks cost $119 at new egg. that means you can get 8 gigs of RAM for $100 bucks. And 16 gigs of RAM for $200!

Now all you have to do is get something like a Power Mac “G5” that has 8 slots. OR just get a server board. (E-Bay has a used server with 16 gigs of RAM, 4 CPU's for like 900 bucks!) Some of these have 16 slots for memory like the newer Intel Server boards . The down side to most of these boards is that they require ECC memory witch slows down the systems and brings up the cost of memory. If these boards could take regular memory (My word processing is not mission critical neither is my porn) then we all could enjoy the benefits from the advances of SSD's without the high price and lack luster performance of current crop of Pro-consumer SSD's.

The BIOS could act as if was controlling the memory on board to act like a drive rather then just system RAM. That means instant restarts and BIOS level operated RAID to control the rewrite of the data to the HDD's. The really sad thing here is that a board populated by nothing but RAM slots would cost less then $50 bucks to make IN VOLUME! ( Assuming they sell all of them like hot cakes and sell close to 100,000 of them with 128 memory slots ) Then give it connection directly to the high speed buses on a system board. Even a SATA 2 connection would be suffice. You could get a BUNCH of 128-256-512-1-2 gig sticks and use them! It would be cheaper to just use 1-2 GB RAM sticks and populate the whole array with these at 20 bucks a pop or less.

Even the low end user that has very little bones to spare can attain a fast as hell PC in less then a year and have 16-32 gigs of RAM to really rock all corresponding programs he uses. The dark side of this is that programs will continue to bloat to the point that you need all 32 gigs of that RAM just to load windows or use something like Internet explorer.


So in reality, you need more like 128 gigs of RAM to avoid this on a everyday computer. To get that you would need 64 RAM slots, and that's 1200 bucks. About a grand if you buy the stuff in bulk, But who will?

The thing to remember is that THIS IS THE REAL BOTTLE NECK THAT WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT RIGHT NOW! and no one wants to look at it.

("It's as plain as the nose on your face"-THX1311... )

RAM! , always been the RAM.... So if you can afford 16 gigs of RAM or even 32 for about a thousand, (still less then some of the SSD's out there and a whole hell of allot more useful and not to mention faster!) You can really take advantage of having a real RAM based SSD's speeds an theoretical advantages for a fraction of the price of the big boy units out there. Or you can just get one of those SATA based RAM disks available for about 200 bucks or less from gigabyte and use it to expand your storage speed that way. (I would use a RAID-1 array to play on the safe side in case the battery power goes dead)

Those out there dreaming of Compact flash IDE arrays are dreaming. they are slower in real world use then traditional HDD's One person at work tried the 8 port IDE adapter with 8 CF cards in a raid stripe 0 array. doing I/O it was slower in all respects to a normal HD in almost every way. SO DO NOT BOTHER TO WASTE YOUR MONEY THIS WAY! DO IT FOR KICKS, NOT PERFORMANCE!

Yea they were the old 512 MB cards, But they were cheap, and we had some laying around so we tried it.

The only other way to have a really fast RAM disk is....

(THEORETICALLY I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS ......Yet...)

is to get a bunch of OS-9 computers load them up with the max amount of RAM, create large RAM disks on all of them. (say like 20 of them) then use OS-X to take those drives and stripe all of them via Ethernet & 1394-over-TCP/IP. (Courtesy of Uni-brains drivers) and use AFP for max file performance. (OS-X is not the best performing network OS) into one really cool logical drive. (albeit the most inefficient, slow, power hungry, loud Wind Tunnel machine EVER!

Thank you.

 

my response was to big.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=1832909#post1832909

 

SSD? nah... I'll stay away from it for now, write speeds and capacity arent there yet.

as for using ram, well, this should do.

 

TMS not TI my bad

I thought that was made by Texases Instruments Woops! Don't we all wish we had a DOD budget laying around? That Thing is like Cool million!

 

Nice SSD tower until i read this: "Requires 2,500 watts of power"
I was like wtf???

 

120GB for $700/GB What a deal!

350 Watts if you just want one, can only afford one, Or only have $90,000 and your best hand-shake (Job) ready...

 

Considering that 15Krpm drives that are what, 15 years old? are still spinning just fine, I'd say WD can make it's drive last at least 5. That said, I want to hear this spin up. Other than the noise it made, I miss my RAID0 SCSI Array

 

are sure enough, here are SSDs

 

Damned! Beat me to it!