Why are hds so slow?

[Neke]

A few questions I haven't yet found answers to...

Why are there now 15k rpm sata drives?

Why is WD the only company making 10k rpm sata drives?

Are the high rpm speeds not really that beneficial, or are 'they' wanting to protect the scsi market?

Any info appreciated, thanks!

 

[Guest]

My take on it is for the SCSI market and the fact that it is more expensive to make and guarantee/certify parts that can withstand 15000RPM. One of the reason SCSI drive are much more expensive.

WD don't make any SCSI so it wouldn't cannibalize their sale, Now that Seagate bought WD I do think that the product is doing good enough for Seagate to keep it.

Edited it in size 2

 

[apache_lives]

My take on it is for the SCSI market and the fact that it is more expensive to make and guarantee/certify parts that can withstand 15000RPM. One of the reason SCSI drive are much more expensive.

WD don't make any SCSI so it wouldn't cannibalize their sale, Now that Seagate bought WD I do think that the product is doing good enough for Seagate to keep it.

Seagate bought WD? 8O

dont you mean seagate bought maxtor?

 

[pmr]

A few questions I haven't yet found answers to...

Why are there now 15k rpm sata drives?

Why is WD the only company making 10k rpm sata drives?

Are the high rpm speeds not really that beneficial, or are 'they' wanting to protect the scsi market?

Any info appreciated, thanks!

Good question...
We are stuck at 7200rpm for a while. Why didn´t 10 or 15k become mainstream yet?

 

[Guest]

Omg. I am officialy brain dead, really don't know how I came up with that.
Blame alcohol and monday..

 

[leo2kp]

A lot of it has to do with capacity. The faster the spindle speed, the smaller the disks have to be. For a lot of people, the only way to get enough capacity out of a 10k drive is to RAID-0/5 the sucker, which gets more expensive. With the emergence of solid-state HDD's, I don't see the current hard-drives going much further than they're at right now. We may see some perpendicular drives hit 10k with 300GB capacity, but by then the solid-state drives will be faster and use less power, as well as able to handle loads of storage. I think we're nearing the end of spinning magnetic disks (as far as mainstream goes).

I'm probably wrong though hehe.

 

[MarkG]

I think we're nearing the end of spinning magnetic disks (as far as mainstream goes).

Usable solid-state drives have been 'a few years away' for at least fifteen years now. Maybe in another fifteen years you'll be able to buy a 750GB solid-state drive for $300.

We are stuck at 7200rpm for a while. Why didn´t 10 or 15k become mainstream yet?

Because hardly anyone actually needs them, at least to the extent of being willing to pay the extra cost involved. You need a dramatic reduction in seek time to really make a big difference to user-level performance.

 

[plankmeister]

It'd be great if the manufacturers created a caching system that used add-in RAM sticks... SODIMM for example... Then you could kit out your HDD with 2GB of cache, and the caching algorithm would be prefetching all the data it thought you were going to need next... I suppose this is a bit like the superfetch for Vista, but using normal memory instead of flash...
Just imagine... kitting it out with 8GB.... an installation of XP and a few apps and a game or two could entirely fit in the cache! What a zippy experience that would be

 

[duthoy]

ah, with the hybrid drives, i would use the hybrid part for swap file, if it's big enough also for OS.

 

[croc]

I personally have not seen any references to 15k SATA drives.... If you have, please share with us the link.

 

[Neke]

So what do you all use for your system drive? Do you go the raptor route? Do you stripe a couple drives? Do you use scsi? Do you think it worth the extra few $ to get the 15k?

 

[leo2kp]

Actually, I'm using 2 160GB SATA2 WD Enterprise drives. 7200RPM but every benchmark I've ran says I have better performance than any 15k drive and I'm almost as fast as 4x36GB Raptor drives in RAID-0. I'm doing roughly 115+mb/s with a seek-time of 8ms with my setup. Same with HDTach...I'm faster than older 74GB Raptors in RAID-0. I'm in no hurry to get the new Raptors right now.

Of course those are all synthetic benchmarks. I'm sure you'll notice a difference with 10k drives in a real-world situation...maybe I've never tried 10K drives in RAID-0 but I'd like to

Realstically though, if a 10s boot-time is too long for you and you can't stand waiting 3s to load the next dungeon, then yeah get a couple 10k drives. But that's the only time you'll ever notice it...when you're loading data that's not already in RAM. When I rack up enough cash I just might RAID some Raptors for system/page file to see if there's a big difference You'll really only notice your hard-drives in the first 30 minutes or so of game-play. The rest of the time you're most likely pulling from RAM. I'd first put the cash in to something that will offer more overall performance for a longer period of time, i.e. a faster processor, more RAM, or a better video card.