Hitachi Ships Industry's Fastest 10K RPM HDD

anyone want to clarify why someone would want this over an SSD? Is price the only problem? the new sandforce drives are around the corner...

Interesting. Would love to see performance data compared to the new SSD's just for giggles. Plus knowing the retail price would be nice too. This could be an exciting product, or it could be a waste depending on price vs performance compared with SSDs.

main reason would be cost per GB...

SSD is FAST but most people won't be able to afford anything bigger than 128GB...

with magnetic drives, you still have fast access especially in RAID while having 300GB or more while having price that's more affordable than SSD....

The only advantage that 10k rpm drives is sequential writes and slightly faster access times but that is all. The spindle motors are what worry me. For servers it is best to do a raid of just a few SSD for paging and os then leave mechanical for storage in another raid.

Most of the 10k RPM and Server drives in general I've seen tend to last a good long while. Old ones might whine a bit, but so did the server drives back in the 90s that were 5400 and 7200 rpms. Heck, I still have some old SCSI drives from back then that still work.

The difference in price is huge. You shouldn't compare it with standard MLC based SSDs, as MLC based SSD would degrade very quickly with an enterprise server usage pattern. For the price of an SLC based SSD with comparable capacity and performance, you can probably buy a brand new (small) car. Not many companies are ready to shell out that much money.


Not many companies would

Databases. No way are SSD (currently) going to survive the random reads/writes of a large database with multiple connections. SSD's are not designed for this application. Other than that though, not much.... lol

Absolutely, the ideal solution is usually a mix in my experience. With both deployed together you get a good rounded solution when it comes to accessing and storing data and still having a foot in both doors, so to speak.

Some people aren't so capable of maintaining an SSD drive. they wouldn't know to move the random read-write operations to a platter drive, for those types of people, it's perfect.

Anyone on here own an SLC SSD? not me

Brand name still scares me, I know this is a new product but I have replaced countless hitachi drives in the past....

I have a candidate that worked at Samsung, he is a SQL DBA. They were testing prototype database setups using FULL SSD solutions. He said they were blazing fast, but you'd have to hot swap SSD's because they would die out after a while.

Why this product is still relevant: SSDs can't handle the massive read/writes that it will have to contend with in a large server. It would quickly wear the cells out.

I would like to see a benchmark throwdown between this and a WD Velociraptor.

Hitachi consumer drives are poo, but their enterprise drives are very high quality.

Velociraptor is fast, but I wager when you throw it in as a contender against proper server-class SAS drives, it will lose by a fair margin.

Hope the price is good.

Ou can thumbs down me all you want,but after the whole scsi firmware issue I went cheetah and didn't look back.kudos if 10 years later they got it right.

Not that a WEI score means anything useful, but I'm curious as to what Windows 7 would rate this hard drive as.

I do. I have a Intel 32GBSSDSLCG1 that I have my W7 OS on. Runs like an Intel is built to run. I have a total of 5 SSD'S in my aresnal, I would never consider going back to spinners. That is like listening to a great tune on a cassette then hearing it on a CD. After doing so, you would never put yourself thru that again. These companies are trying to hang on to the traditional HDD's as long as they can, there demise is not far off. Just wait and see what 2011 brings us!
I will admit this though. Of all the HDD'S I used to use, I never had 1 Hitachi go bad on me. That is who Panasonic uses in there Toughbooks if you don't choose the SSD option. Panny must know something when you look at there failure rate compared to the plastic throwaway laptops produced for the mass market these days.

Above details fairly concise
Apart from
Transfer speeds
...
Why?

Quite a few SLC SSDs out there and the prices are way above the MLC
RealSSD P300
OCZ Agility EX 60GB SLC SSD
OCZSSD2-1VTXEX120G
Intel's 32GB SLC SSD ( Enterprise Class)
Ridata SLC SSD

Are just a few of them

I am always keen to adopt new technology especially performance technology. I do not agree however that we will see the end of the HDD anytime soon. As long as people require large capacity cheap media then the HDD will be there. Work PC's do not require SSD's and nor do budget machines for home users. Servers have requirements not suited to SSD technology and external back up drives are amply served by the HDD. Velicoraptors deliver excellent real world performance and it sounds like this Hitachi will do the same.

Right.
People forget that SSDs are semiconductor-based storage devices.
We are reaching the limits of semiconductor miniaturization and the development will actually slow down(unless someone invent some new revolutionary semiconductor physics, which is very unlikely in next 20 years or so). Even the recent SSD developments (like Sandforce) are more or less trickery (compresssion etc.) and not something fundamental - you have always some drawbacks, need to steadily maintain the drive etc, etc.
No one serious thinks that SSDs will replace classical HDDs (for a mass storage). The real successor is expected to come from new developments in Spintronics research, which has way more potential.

If I were building a new Video Editing machine... SSD for OS drive and 4 or 6 of these Hitachi's in RAID 1+0... yes, I like it.

blarneypete writes:
> Velociraptor is fast, but I wager when you throw it in as a
> contender against proper server-class SAS drives, it will lose
> by a fair margin

Correct! I wanted fast storage, but I need a lot of space aswell
(video); SSDs are still too expensive at such capacities, so 2 x
450GB 15K SAS in RAID0 was a nice compromise. A normal 1TB SATA
acts as a clone backup unit.

I recently tested some of the better SAS models, eg. the Seagate
450GB 15K ST3450857SS. Even just with a normal 3Gbit SAS connection,
it's way faster than a WD VR 150GB 10K SATA. See my page:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/diskdata.html

I've yet to run my access time test on the SAS drives though, not
had the time.

Note that for sequential I/O, even a normal 7200rpm 1TB SATA (eg.
Samsung Spinpoint F3) can be faster than a WD VR (the F3 has a
faster maximum but slower minimum). The VR's access time is its
main advantage, but except for SSDs nothing can match 15K SAS,
especially in RAID (I've yet to test more than 2 SAS drives in
this way). I'd be intrigued to know though how Hitachi's new drive
compares to the WD VR for access time; so far, the WD VR has
beaten every 10K SCSI I've tested, though it's surprising how well
some of the older models perform, eg. a Fujitsu 9GB 10K SCA was
only a little slower than the WD VR.

Ian.

PS. I have some spare 450GB 15K SAS drives for sale if anyone's
interested. See: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot [...] s.html#SAS

it ain't fatest until Tom's HW guys benchmarked it and say it is so. but the specs look really enticing.

15k RPM SAS ftw.

Velicoraptors are no match for a good SAS setup but again we come back to the money and real world performance. The Velicoraptor and this new Hitachi are well positioned for the budget minded enthusiast. There are many issues that must be considered. For instance with RAM configurations hitting 4, 8 and 12 GB running Superfetch the HDD performance is not as critical as it used to be. Even running 4 GB RAM my systems barely hit the swap file these days. When I run Video Editing Software (Consumer Level) the software itself is the bottleneck. On my i series computers there is no bottleneck to be found at a hardware level and the Velicoraptors are not even close to their peak performance. The RAM is not Hard Faulting and the Processors are cruising along. The modern PC is well equipped to deal with 32 bit applications and it is only when more 64 bit software comes out that the gap between hardware and software capability will reduce. It is true that the SSD can beat the Velicoraptor. The thing is I am not prepared to hand over money so that MS Word or Fallout 3 will load a split second faster. Total Cost of Ownership and Real World Performance are the true benchmarks of PC performance in my opinion.

The point is moot... If you use a SSD for your boot & OS, you will be amazed at seeing IE8-9 open instantly, Windows boots up in around 15 seconds, and there simply is no-noise. Given this, why would one pick up a 10K RPM drive at a higher cost than 7200's just for media file storage ?

Ok well I timed the boot time of my i5 (which boots exactly at the same speed as my i7) and 17 seconds was consumed by the BIOS alone. The time Windows took once the BIOS had finished was 23 seconds. All Office Applications including IE are loading in well under a second. Now if we look at the cost $345 NZ dollars gets me a 300 GB Velicoraptor. A 240 GB SSD with a decent Brand Name costs $1024 NZ. So for the price of one SSD I can have 3 300 GB Velicoraptors in RAID 0 which puts out some serious benchmarks and I have 900 GB in storage. The Velicoraptors have better seek times than 7200 RPM drives and sustain very respectable transfer rates that never drop no matter how large the files. My 7200 RPM drives average 40 MB second while the Velicoraptors are hitting 120 MB a second sustained. That kind of performance gain is to good to ignore but is achieved at a much more reasonable cost than the SSD options currently available.

Completely missing the point. Some times speed is not required where space is. There are very very few reasons to have fast speeds where SSD's are required. Typically a 24x 300GB - 15k drives on a SANs is plenty fast. So you have space, spindle speed, and redundency. Where as SSD's is strictly speed and not space. With 15k SAS drives you got the best of both worlds which is usually required.

Typically a corporation either needs speed and space or space and not speed. It's rearely the case where speed and not space is required. Typically they would just setup a 4GB RAM drive if speed is required.