News Distributor announces 2.5" 15K hard drive

Weren't the Velociraptors 2.5", just had some kind of heatsink to prevent them burning their way out of the case? Or am I thinking of something else?

 

The heatsink on the velociraptor is just so it will fit in a standard 3.5" drive slot. The drive runs cooler than your average 7200rpm desktop drive.

15k 2.5" drives are old hat, but if they've managed to get 900GB spinning at 15k would be impressive, though I'm suspicious that the 900GB part is a 10k drive, as reported by Engadget - http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/06/distributor-roadmap-shows-super-speedy-900gb-2-5-inch-hdd/

The drive will never see the inside of a laptop though. This drive is an enterprise drive, will certainly be on the SAS interface (maybe FC, but unlikely as 2.5" drive's haven't really made their way to enterprise level arrays), and will be a whole 5mm thicker than your average laptop drive. These drives will be living almost exclusively in datacentres with anything up to ~1100 brothers and sisters just like it.

 

VelociRaptors ARE 2.5", but fatter than normal 2.5"s

 

Yeah, for the price of this new drive, you could likely buy a SSD with (maybe) half the capacity, and more than twice the performance. Seems an interesting, if expensive, compromise.

 

Half?

Not very likely...

 

Pair this beast up with the mobile Fermi cards and the intel quad core and your battery life will only be as long as it takes for the capacitors to discharge

 

Had this news be dated "may 7th 2005" I would have been excited about this but now, as of 2010, I couldn't care less to be honest.


SSD cheesecake

 

According to The Register it looks like it's going to be Seagate rather than WD making the 15K drives. WD look to be entering the SSD market instead.