The amount of cache doesn't matter much since it depends on the effeciency of the firmware, plus since you're behind a full fledged RAID card that further negates the cache. Plus nice PR report, how much are they paying for these?

I care more about the price at this point. If it's significantly more and cost almost like an SSD drive. i would probably just buy a ssd instead. Then again, this has 600gb...

There are a number of companies making 15k drives for enterprise use. I've been using 15k Cheetah's for 5 or 6 years now for my high end workstations.

I've been running 3.5" Hitachi 15k drives for years, other than the 2.5" drives being 15k this isn't news.

dear tomshardware.... IF YOU DON'T PUT THE PRICE WE CAN'T COMPARE IT TO NOTHING AND THE ARTICLE IT'S ALMOST WORTHLESS SO PLEASE DO YOUR HOMEWORK AND DON'T FORGET TO SAY WHAT'S THE PRICE OF THE PRODUCTS THAT YOU PRESENT ON YOUR ARTICLES. thanks.

the thing probably sounds like a dentist drill

Newer 15Ks can be a lot faster than earlier models. If you're
using a HUS151414VL3600 or HUS151473VL3800 for example (146GB/15K
and 73GB/15K Hitachi drives respectively), then newer models could
be twice as fast. I've tested a wide range of drives and there is
huge variance. See:

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

The advantages of modern production methods are very evident
with the WD VR 10K beating every 10K SCSI disk for both tests,
and most of the 15Ks aswell. I've not yet been able to test any
newer SCSI/FC/SAS disks though.

My PC has Maxtor 146GB 15Ks (1 internal, 12 external) plus a 1TB
SATA (video archive), while all my SGIs have the same Maxtor 15Ks
except for my main Fuel desktop - the system I'm typing this on -
which has a Fujitsu 300GB 15K MBA3300NC (system disk), Fujitsu
300GB 10K MAT3300NP (data) and a 1TB SATA (backup of the PC's
1TB). The nice part about 15K SCSI is it's very cheap 2nd-hand.

Noise levels of 15Ks vary enormously. Old 18GB 15Ks can be very
loud, but other 15Ks are nice and quiet, eg. the MAS3367NC,
ST336754LC and BF03685A35.

Hitachi's new drives, using modern tech, are probably quite good
aswell wrt noise levels, if the WD VR 10K is anything to go by.

Ian.

If they could put the 2.5" one in a 3.5" enclosure to get the noise down to acceptable levels, and if it didn't cost me my house.... then I would jump at the chance of using a pair of these as my Audio Drive for recording. I'll never have to worry about dropouts again!

I refuse to do business with Hitachi. I had a 500 GB Hitachi internal and it died shortly after a year of (infrequent) use. This would be acceptable if it was a 500 GB external HDD that I used every day and was being carried around susceptible to shocks etc. (my brother had a 500 GB WD fail as well), but there was no explanation for the Hitachi to die prematurely like that.

I then replaced it with Seagate's new 7200.12 749GB internal HDD which has been working great for me with no problems at all. My old Hitachi used to make noises sometimes when I turned my computer on or when I was installing programs but this one is silent. And it's amazing that the new Seagate cost me just $70.


I agree with the others, in around three years SSDs will become much more affordable. I can see in the future all operating systems being installed on SSDs and HDDs only being used as secondary drives. But as it currently is, where you can get a 750GB HDD for $70, there's just no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a 15K RPM HDD or 60-120 GB flash drive.

Damn I read the headline and was hoping that they were desktop drives. I know it was a long shot but 15k rpm desktop drives might be enticing enough to stay with hdd's for a little longer intead of getting a ssd. I think somebody should make one though, it'd put a velociraptor to shame. But for the right price, I think there'd be a market for them until ssd drives get to a more mainstream price for the capacities offered.

these should already be bigger than 184GB of storage capacity by now.

pocketdrummer writes:
> then I would jump at the chance of using a pair of these as my
> Audio Drive for recording.

A drive like this is total overkill for recording audio. Any existing 15K
disk will do, indeed any 10K disk, or for that matter any decent SATA.
Audio requires a tiny amount of bandwidth. See my benchmark results page
mentioned above; simply find a disk that offers a minimum sustained
I/O which is comfortably above the bandwidth required for recording
uncompressed audio (at 64bit resolution if you want to be really paranoid),
which really is pretty much any of them.


xeysz writes:
> I refuse to do business with Hitachi. I had a 500 GB Hitachi
> internal and it died shortly after a year of (infrequent) use. ...

(shortly after a year? That's a wierd way of putting it, given many
consumer disks only have a 1 year warranty. )

If that was a SATA, then it's no surprise. SATAs from any vendor can
die in short order. If you want quality and 24/7 reliability then
don't buy conventional SATA; it's is totally different ball game. You
get what you pay for when it comes to SATA, eg. most SATAs are not
designed for 24/7 use, which is why the 'RAID class' SATAs cost 2X
more than generic versions, eg. check prices for Seagate models whose
model numbers end in 'NS'.

I know of plenty of people who've had equally bad problems with Seagate (eg.
a movie studio sent eight seagate AS drives, ALL of them failed in less
than a week), and let us not forget Seagate's recent firmware fiasco.


> there's just no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a 15K RPM HDD or 60-120 GB flash drive.

Depends on the 15K (plenty of models available 2nd-hand) and it
depends on what you're doing. I find I have to search my email
archive for some item of information many times a day - a 15K drive
speeds up this operation by some 40% compared to a SCSI 10K, while a
typical 7200pm SATA is by comparison _massively_ slower (check my
access time search test results).


amdgamer666 writes:
> I think somebody should make one though, it'd put a velociraptor to shame.

There are already numerous models of 15K which leave the WD VR in the
dust, but they're not consumer-type drives. Totally different market
segment, eg. large cache RAM, high reliability, etc.


liquidsnake718 writes:
> these should already be bigger than 184GB of storage capacity by now.

There are already numerous models of 15K drive much larger than this,
eg. the older 450GB Seagate 15K.6 FC. More recently there's the 600GB
Seagate 15K.7.


wildwell writes:
> I don't think there are any E-class SSDs yet, and this thing will
> write a lot faster. For personal use though, I think my laptop's
> getting an SSD.

There are various Enterprise SSD products, eg. SUN's recent SSD SAN
product, and existing designs such as this:

http://hothardware.com/News/RamSan [...] -Flash-SSD

They are not, however, normally aimed at general data storage (though
I suppose one could use for that if money was no object). Rather,
they are ideal for holding indexing data, meta data, that sort of
thing, where the tiny access times make a huge difference to search
times. And btw, the RamSan620 costs $220K.

For consumers, the current crop of SSDs give more than enough of a
boost over conventional HDDs to be worth investing in even now. Just
don't buy a cheap one because they're garbage.

I can't afford the good models of SSD which are available just now
though, so I compromise by buying 2nd-hand 15K SCSI, eg. the 300GB
15K in my main SGI system only cost me 80 UKP (approx. $120) while
the 146GB 15K in my PC (system disk) cost me 40 UKP (approx. $60).


If you want better quality than ordinary SATA, but can't afford
current SSDs or Enterprise 15K, then hunt for ordinary 2nd-hand 15K
SCSI/FC/SAS, or failing that then grab a WD VR which are certainly
very good, beating many older 15Ks because of its modern design, and
the low noise/heat of the WD VR is excellent. Plenty of bargains to
be had, especially drives which still have valid end user warranties
(look for Seagate/Maxtor for this). The beauty of SATA is raw storage
at low cost. Thus, I have lots of 15K SCSI for speed (RAID0 for
uncompressed HD with Flame), but I bought a couple of 1TB Samsung
SATAs (Spinpoint F1) for storage (large movie files) and I'm very
happy with them, but I'll always use 15K SCSI/FC/SAS or, when I can
one day afford it, an SSD for a system drive.

If you have family who don't know what to buy you for xmas, then ask
for an Intel X25 SSD. Simple example: the person who sold me the
WD VR shown on my test page. He sold it because he was upgrading to 2
x X25s in RAID0, about which he said, "It is very very nice. Average
read at around 450MB/sec and write at 150MB/sec and access around 0.2ms."

Ian.

15K drives have been around for 10 years.....this is news?

the need for speed. gets me high just reading the specs. no mention of price - always a bad omen. SAS drives in a netbook? desperate times call for desperate ideas.

For a budget minded enterprise, these new 15K drives would be more than adequate. After reading the specs mentioned by mapesdhs, it seems like the Velociraptor is still a great option for the performance minded home consumer. I was considering an SAS controller and a 15k enterprise class drive (decent SSD's are ridiculous in price), but for the price, space, and performance, the V. Raptor was perfect.

These 15K drives revolve 15 Thousand times every minute! Almost One Million times per hour!! Over TWENTY MILLION times per day!!!

generally 15K hard drives are consider enterprise drives...
Not intended for home use.

Yup, the WD VR is pretty good. I was kinda sceptical before I
obtained one, but the modern technology it uses makes all the
difference. Indeed, it's actually a 2.5" device, sits inside
a 3.5" frame that acts as a heatsink.

It's easy to obtain SAS controllers 2nd-hand, but good 2nd-hand
SAS drives are hard to find at a sensible price, and as buwish
says prices of new SAS drives are *ahem* a tad high. However,
baring in mind the tradeoff in price/performance, a WD VR or an
older 15K SCSI/FC/etc. are both good choices, costing more or
less the same. Some models of 15K have the speed edge, but the
VR wins on noise/heat.


I did used to wonder why there was no such thing as 15K SATA using
the same tech used for the WD VR, but I guess there's no consumer
demand for that type of drive, and the pricing would be such
that, certainly by now anyway, an SSD would cost the same
or be cheaper.

If the slightly more heat/noise doesn't bother you though, then
in general a good 2nd-hand 147GB 15K SCSI will be cheaper than
a 150GB WD VR 10K SATA. Oh, remember to go for the later models
of WD though, ie. VRs, not just Raptors.

SCSI cards are of course mere pennies on eBay these days, and
for RAID speed there are the PERC PCIe cards which are nice &
fast (I'll be using one in my i7 build), though a simple yet
quick U320 card such as the LSI 22320 PCIX or LS20320IE is more
than enough for a system disk. My PC's system disk is on an LSI
20320IE (PCI Express card) while the 12-disk RAID is connected
to a 22320R PCIX (mbd has proper PCIX/133).

I notice that 15Ks do tend to be cheaper in the US on eBay, but
either way, try and find one that still has a valid end user
warranty (Seagate/Maxtor). I nabbed one cheap that's covered
until the end of 2012. 8) Ask for the serial number and then
check here:

http://support.seagate.com/custome [...] dation.jsp

Hope this helps!

Ian.

PS. One other point: there are way more WD VRs on eBay now than
there were a year ago, so much easier to obtain. This time last
year, at least in the UK, used 10K SATA was almost non-existent
on eBay.

lamorpa, yes, they have a high rpm, but as zipzoomflyhigh rightly
points out, 15K technology is not new. Check my benchmarks page;
older 15K drives (eg. 18GB) show good results for the access time
test (processing lots of small files) but they are not very good
for sequential I/O because they use older technology - larger
number of lower density platters, older types of read/write heads
which make more noise/heat, etc.


dark_lord69, the original target market of 15Ks is indeed
Enterprise, but given their performance, 2nd-hand units are ideal
for the home enthusiast, especially those who would like extra
performance but cannot afford SSDs.

For example, here's a Maxtor Atlas 15K 36GB on eBay just now,
only 8 UKP, 2 hours to go, no bids yet:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI [...] 0512956951

It's one of the fastest drives I've tested so far; ideal for
a simple system disk, home server boot drive, etc. The 15K II
series is better, but not by much.

Re past auctions, here's a 73GB 15K Seagate which sold for a
good price a couple of days ago:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI [...] 0368217243

For WD VRs, 100 UKP seems to be about typical for a 150GB, and
around 150+ for a 300GB, but bargains keep occuring, eg. a 300GB
WD VR went last week for 122 UKP (item 170389926209) and another
went for 125 UKP (item 180415908881), though interesting to
compare to the 300GB 15K SCSIs I bought which cost between 80
and 100.

Shop around! Plenty of bargains to be had. Ditto for 10K SCSI of
course, eg. the cheapest I've paid for a 300GB 10K SCSI is 31 UKP.

Ian.