Hard drives must get faster!!!

[brendini]

Alright, this in kind of a rant, but bear with me. I was thinking about upgrading my system in a few months, and the options looked pretty good. I like the Nforce2 motherboards and the cheap Ahtlon XP's. But then I looked at hard drives. They have barely changed in comparison to processors! In the last two years we have seen processor clock, memory, and frontside bus speeds explode! But as for hard drives, they're still stuck with the same technology! Something has to get faster. Serial ATA sounded great until we found out that it would be barely any faster! It matters a lot less that you have an 800 mb/s connection between the northbridge and southbridge if your hard drive runs at a max of 100 mb/s! I am now not going to upgrade my computer until hard drives get fast enough so that computers can actually utilize their full speed! (well, maybe I will, I'm still kind of tempted) Anyways, there goes my rant!

<Brendini>

 

[mattburklund]

western Digital has a 10,000rpm drive coming out any day now

 

[camieabz]

RPM speeds can only go so high before that spindle is spinning too fast for the heads to read the data, but I'd be interested to see what 10K rpms would do to maximising IDE drive speeds.

<b><font color=blue>~ <A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=324&s=58e94ba84a16bedfebbf0f416d5bac48" target="_new">Nice sig 81.</A> ~<font color=blue></b>

 

[orbz]

Hard drives have moving parts so the technology is limited. Cpus, chipsets, ram don't have moving parts. I think we need a new storage device. The only improvements to HD are more space.

<i><font color=blue>There is no failure when you believe in success.</font color=blue></i>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

dunno about that... things ARE slowly improving.

Cache sizes have increased over time, 512k 2mb and now 8Mb.
Spindle speeds have gone from 4200 thru 5400 up to 7200. Due to economic factors they have stagnated for a while at 7200, but hopefully the new W.D. 10k rpm IDE drive will eventually filter itsway from the enterprise sector through to the retail market.
And increasing data densities have also improved sustained read/write speeds. 50+Mb/sec read for an IDE drive was unheard of a few years back.

And face it... there is no other economically viable alternative around at the moment.
Hard drives are here to stay

<i>"Revenues were less than robust"</i> - QWEST
<i>"The company applied its accounting policies incorrectly"</i> - WORLDCOM
<i>"Certian financial adjustments may be required"</i> - AOL+TW.

 

[orbz]

And face it... there is no other economically viable alternative around at the moment. Hard drives are here to stay

So true.

Yah, kinda overlooked at those pretty good improvements. I think it would be cool for WD to bring 10k rpm drives to the retail market but would we need more cooling? Faster speeds seems to always bring more heat.

<i><font color=blue>There is no failure when you believe in success.</font color=blue></i>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

Initially the 10k and 15k drives were toasty buggers.

But if you look at benchmarks of the modern fluid drives even the 15k units are cool enough to run without active cooling. So as time goes by they are definately improving.

Though thats possibly why the W.D. 10k drive only has 1 platter of 36Gb capacity. Easier to manufacture, less technical issues and cooler running.

I do hope that
A. they make a 2 platter model and
B. it reaches the retail market

the geekboys are a good niche market to suck money from.

<i>"Revenues were less than robust"</i> - QWEST
<i>"The company applied its accounting policies incorrectly"</i> - WORLDCOM
<i>"Certian financial adjustments may be required"</i> - AOL+TW.

 

[Cuda]

The new WD 10k drive appears to be much more than just spindle speeds. It actually looks like it will use the bandwidth available on the new SATA controller.

Check the specs: http://www.wdc.com/products/WD360GD.asp

I'm going to try a pair of these in a RAID 0 on a Asus A7N8X. Hope it's not money wasted.

 

[brendini]

Yeah, do that! This looks really good, and with a Raid it will be great? Have you found any good prices on it?

<Brendini>

 

[livedistortion]

Is the WD drive going to be available to the general public? It should already be out, but I can't find it anywhere. It's aimed for business use, but it should be good for home use too, right? Any idea on price? Also, you guys may want to wait for the new Hitachi 15K IDE drive coming in the second quarter.

 

[mattburklund]

I believe the price is right at $160usa.

 

[Cuda]

I've not found anyone shipping the WD Raptor yet, but I suspect based on the Western Digital Press Release the drives should be available not later than March 2003. They are actually supposed to be out by the end of Feb. 2003. Oh and the $160 range has been tossed around.

They are aiming at Enterprise people, but I think they will find a niche with the gamers. Especially if they get their platter size up. Even if it remains a smaller drive, I can see people using them for their OS and Applications and using a traditional PATA drive for mass storage.

Check out the warranty. 5 years when all the others are dropping to 1year.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Cuda on 02/26/03 10:59 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[lhgpoobaa]

yes... i could easily see myself with one as my primary drive, partitioned 2 ways to be my boot os drive and divx encoding drive.

<i>"Revenues were less than robust"</i> - QWEST
<i>"The company applied its accounting policies incorrectly"</i> - WORLDCOM
<i>"Certian financial adjustments may be required"</i> - AOL+TW.

 

[upec]

Although hard drive have improve little in term of speed but it have improve greatly in term of size.