Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor

20k?!!

That's insane. I want to see some reviews, if/when it hits. Gotta be good for a laugh at least.

this is really seems to be a desperate act, surly they would be better off putting the time into ssds

Whoop, 20K for the win! Although true, it does seem a bit excessive just to keep an aging tech up to date.

It will be ok as long as you don't put it in a cheap case, it would shake it to bits.

Wow.. 20k rpm. When the orginal raptors were out they werent cheap. I'm guessing these will cost quite a bit -- maybe more than the leading SSDs which will make SSDs a more viable option! :D

Western Digital knows what price point they have to worry about, so I don't find it likely that they'll be more expensive than solid state drives - but then again, that also comes down to the R&D and material costs. We'll just have to wait and see.

who needs damping if you have Antec case? p182 cheesecake!
my Raptor 74GB is almost silent, i don't hear anything idle, and similar noise to the 500GB AAKS when seeking..... where the AAKS are said to be silent!

20k RPM! i may get one just to piss off a Apple lover, where they only have 15k RPM drives :P

i think in the end all Hard Drive manufacturers will move a limb or 2 and then finally die... UNLESS they jump onto the ssd as soon as possible and co-operating with some memory manufactures. Because by the time SSD reach the consumer levels, there is no going back because there is (almost) no negative thing to think about compares to a Hard Drive.

SSD:
+ no noise
+ no vibrations
+ no moving parts
+ no magnetic problems
+ ultra fast
+ small
+ Energy efficient
+ Less/none heat buildup
+ Memory will grow over time (so no issues here)
+ less recourses needed to build
+ Life cycle
+ no problems with shocks

- Expensive (for now)
- eh.. (anybody knows another negative?)

Hard Drive:
+ capacity
+ cheap

- Noise
- Heat
- Vibrations
- Shocks
- Energy
- Life cycle
- Large
- Mechanical moving parts
- Lot of resources to make
- Not so fast
- don't drop it

completely pointless, its a dead tech, performance wise any way. They would be better off working on platter density of their current raptor in the hopes that there would still be a reason to even consider mechanical drives in a year.

My Raptor is driving me nuts at 10,000rpm - I somehow doubt this will be 'silent', probably more like 'less noise than one expects'.

Nope, I'll never buy a single small platter drive again. For storage they are fine. I don't get why they bother competing with performance any more, they've been beaten and they can never catch up again.

For the prive of a Raptor you can get 2 normal drives and strip them, which will give you almost the same performance.

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad
completely pointless, its a dead tech, performance wise any way. They would be better off working on platter density of their current raptor in the hopes that there would still be a reason to even consider mechanical drives in a year.

i agree completely.

Not pointless at all until SSDs get lower in price. This drive would have a lifetime of what... a couple of years? Think SSDs are going to be as affordable in that time frame? Prolly not. Also, HDD tech isn't exactly standing still when it comes to capacities. Having said all that, I can't wait for SSDs to become really affordable as they are the long-term future.

Oh wait, what reliability? Sure they can make things that spin at 20 kRPM, but combining that and magnetic stuff and... Well, I just don't think these are gonna come out or be great products.

Hoover doesn't get cool even if you put chrome rims to it. HDDs aren't gonna remain the kings of the hill even how you supercharge the decades old idea behind them.

Hmm. After initial 'Wow!' thought, my mind then turned to the word 'Stop-gap'. I should imagine that they realise they're behind on SSD tech, and needed something to sell in the mean-time. I should imagine that the resources required for SSD development will be much more than their resources needed to improve their current lines...

Perhaps in 6-12 months you'll see this.. Perhaps in 18-24 months (catch-up) you'll see performance SSDs from WD. :)

Is there still the issue with an SSD, where you can only read / write so many times, as with a flash drive?

(Even so, I'm waiting for cheaper SSD's, before updating my storage)

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
i think in the end all Hard Drive manufacturers will move a limb or 2 and then finally die... UNLESS they jump onto the ssd as soon as possible and co-operating with some memory manufactures. Because by the time SSD reach the consumer levels, there is no going back because there is (almost) no negative thing to think about compares to a Hard Drive.

SSD:
+ no noise
+ no vibrations
+ no moving parts
+ no magnetic problems
+ ultra fast
+ small
+ Energy efficient
+ Less/none heat buildup
+ Memory will grow over time (so no issues here)
+ less recourses needed to build
+ Life cycle
+ no problems with shocks

- Expensive (for now)
- eh.. (anybody knows another negative?)

Hard Drive:
+ capacity
+ cheap

- Noise
- Heat
- Vibrations
- Shocks
- Energy
- Life cycle
- Large
- Mechanical moving parts
- Lot of resources to make
- Not so fast
- don't drop it

Life cycle is not that different if you look a MTBF 1.4m Hours (VelociRaptor) vs 2m Hours (Samsung SSD).Both have MTBF over the life span of humans(~160 years for the VelociRaptor) SDD are the next step in data storage but i don't think they will replace Hard drive anytime soon. Also Currently Hard drive do not suffer from the issue of a shorten life span with large rewrite operations. The SSD currently use of different algorithms to make up for this flaw. IMO SSD still need more time before they hit mainstream

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages

I think it'll be silent to us humans, but as it's spinning full-tilt all the local meandering dogs in the neighborhood will be sitting outside your place howling! :)

i'm more interested in life span and reliability of a drive that fast...

does twice the speed mean half the life?

^QFT

i wonder whats the lifespan of sth that spins at 20k rpm......

Probably gonna need a counter balance to stop your desktop from spinning in place when the drive rev's up

To be honest we will have an idea how good they are then the WD 20K SAS drives start to turn up in servers

Kimbie

I don't know how many drives have died on you people. But I have run drives for years without failures. The longest running one is 8 years of regular use (i don't turn my desktops off) And i had 3 120Gigs that are still good, only got replaced cause I found cheep 250gig drive ($30 and $20 thanks to employee discounts and rebates) and I needed extra space. With the performance of HDD's right now. Capacity to me is WAY more important than performance. If a RAIDed pair of HDDs right now isn't fast enough for you, you have a serious case of ADD or a lack of patience.

Sounds like WD is taking the old media approach to doing business here. Sounds like it's time for them to start re-tooling their machinery in order to make the fastest and most reliable SSDs available, or else they'll end up doing the Wal-Mart thing (competing on price with sub-par products).

The future for fast is SSD - nothing they can do with a spinning disk can knock its seek times to levels anywhere near that of something with no moving parts. For lots of storage, magnetic media still has a good amount of time left - at least until memory gets really dirt cheap. They would be very wise to act accordingly.

when I read "20K RPM", I envisioned my old washing machine sounding like an alien craft launching into space, though I was kinda sad to see that they made the drive very quiet as I wanted to see some PCs with HDD's in them that sound like jet engines, or people sitting on top of their PC cases while they vibrated their way around the room with one arm in the air like they were riding a bull (ahh good old washing machine rodeo's).

Hover car or wheel?

I used to run my (old) system off a U160 15KRPM drive. The only time that was anywhere near "Noisy" was when it spun up. The rest of the time, the sound of the drive spinning was barely audible (In both volume and pitch stakes). Considering that the range of human hearing is 20Hz-20KHz, something spinning at 20KRPM will produce sound at 20KHz, barely audibe.

I would imagine that a 20k rpm drive generates a lot of heat? What kind of cooling would something like this use, do you need to purchase additional or exotic cooling for a hard drive?

We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

if there are vibrational problems at that fast of a spindle speed.... your drive is already dead...

wow although very cool and I probably would buy one its kinda pointless once SSD come down in price or IBM nanowire comes to the scene

how fast does a gyroscope spin? on average @ least. ? they are silent. Maybe its silent to the Human ear.. since its spinning so fast the noise has moved beyond the human range? Would drive you dog nuts though lol

scsi drives spin at 15K, noise is not really a function of rpm but more of balance and bearings. I had to 32gig raptors which I swapped out for a 75 which I'll eventually swap out for a 150gig when I upgrade my computer. Spindles on cnc routers hit 30-40K and are pretty quiet considering the load.
While I think the raptor sounds interesting ultimately SSD will probably slowly take over in the long running (barring any other technology advances) so far the problem just is the fact of limited read write cycles associated with flash. Which means they woudln't be good for holding swap files or php databases on a high traffic server. I think SSD will take over in laptops first where the power space and ruggidness are a big asset.

wasn't there some talk about crystals structures and boron doped diamond as storage along with other out there storage mediums? I'm waiting for something trully impressive

i cant wait to buy my first affordable SSD, until then my 250GB maxtor will do

If I recall correctly most of the current SSD drives that are already in notebooks don't actually perform better than a normal HDD. Until they do then there is really no point IMO.

Originally Posted by metarinka

While I think the raptor sounds interesting ultimately SSD will probably slowly take over in the long running (barring any other technology advances) so far the problem just is the fact of limited read write cycles associated with flash...

wasn't there some talk about crystals structures and boron doped diamond as storage along with other out there storage mediums? I'm waiting for something trully impressive

There are already several forms of non-volatile RAM in the labs with unlimited read/write cycles. In a few years time SSD will be as ubiquitous and cheap as HDD.

Originally Posted by DXR_13KE
i agree completely.

Yep, they should focus on the advantage HDDs have over SSDs, high capacity, although you can get quite high capacity SSDs, you can't get the 1TB size monsters, that and the price are about the only advantage they have currently, best to push that.

At 20K noise may be mostly out of the range of human hearing as too high frequancy. Your dog however will go nuts. I agree though some kind of SSD with a large DDR2 cache (several GB) would rip this to shreads.

on a side note I have a kind of fetish for last dying breath tech so might pick one up second hand in a few years time.. I particualrly love the 4 GPU card put out by voodoo and there very hard to find info on geforce 3 competitor (which was actualy viable and playing games in the last week of voodoo).

20K RPM!!!! Does it have VTEC?

Originally Posted by Nexxo
There are already several forms of non-volatile RAM in the labs with unlimited read/write cycles. In a few years time SSD will be as ubiquitous and cheap as HDD.

Perhaps this is what the 20K stop-gap is in aid of? :) maybe wishful thinking.. Who knows!

Originally Posted by Haltech
20K RPM!!!! Does it have VTEC?

WD just kicked-in, yo! :p

To be honest, having spent the morning over at XtremeSystems reading posts by people who chase maximum bandwidth at all costs, I'm sure this'll do quite well. People are incredibly uneducated and stupid when it comes to hard disks, and bigger numbers make people think it's better, even if it isn't.

Personally I don't see why anyone desires anything faster than a fast high capacity disk, they're damn fast and untill SSD is everywhere you're not really going to do that much better by spending an extra few hundred on a low capacity high speed disk.

i can not see something that spins at that speed being silent and the vibration must be amazing

From the top of my head

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan
SSD: + no magnetic problems

They are sensitive to radiation.

+ ultra fast

No, the SLC are fast. Most MLC are crap. Write speed is quite bad. And a comparison between a Samsung SSD and Fujitsu HD http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/ssd-iram.html

+ Energy efficient

Small drives are. The problem is that the consumption increase linearly with capacity, while on HD it raises per platter

+ Memory will grow over time (so no issues here)

Until a threshold is reached. That's silicon, you just can't make them much cheaper. Density will increase, but newer processes are more expensive.

+ Life cycle

Proof? Link?

- Expensive (for now)

For now? Wishful thinking IMO

- eh.. (anybody knows another negative?)

- SSD can also have electronic problems
- They are very sensitive to write fragmentation
- Professional data recovery is not possible. Even more due to wear leveling
- Wasteful , too small and/or very slow for ISO files, videos, installation packages, hi res pictures, Temp, Temporary internet files, Pagefile, Hibernation file and so on.
- Where is the proof that consumer grade SSD's will have high quality, reliability, and support a large number of write cycles? Or is this based on claims from manufacturers?
- Some manufacturers are packaging cheapo MLC flash and calling them SSD. I'm talking about deceiving advertising


Hard Drive:

- Noise

Not an issue. Samsung F1, Velociraptor, WD 6400AAKS, Green power.

- Heat

Same

- Vibrations
- Shocks

Not an issue for desktops. Laptops and servers, yes.

- Energy

Laptops: Agree, but see above, considering large SSD. And you must consider all the components of a laptop
Desktops: Don't you have a car? Don't you use a 1000W heater in the winter? Don't you turn on the lights?
Servers: TCO is THE metric, not fashion or bandwagons.

- Life cycle

Agreed. You must be careful selecting the hard drive. But then again, I'd like to see a 1000€ worth of proof that SSD have a long life cycle

- Large

Huh?

- Lot of resources to make

That's why they are 15x cheaper p/GB ...

- Not so fast

On some scenarios they are massively faster, on most are a tad slower.

- don't drop it

No I won't :)

Some more SSD disadvantages, or at least half-truths:

- Superfetch mitigates the problem of random reads on HD. So what's the point? It can't do anything about the horrible random writes performance of the SSD. If you have Vista, a PC with SSD will boot faster and that's it.

- SSD prices are coming down, but so are HD's. I can buy a 500GB disk for 75€

- HD's are known to have high failure rates, but SSD doesn't avoid the most common reasons why you lose important data: filesystem corruption, virus, human error like deleting files, application bugs, memory errors that corrupt system cache.

- If I pay 600€, I don't want any compromise, if I pay high end, I want high end.

Originally Posted by Benfica
From the top of my head

They are sensitive to radiation.

And how many of us live in a city that has the radiation level of Pripyat (near Chernobyl) let alone enough radiation to do anything to the data on a solid state drive?

Does sound a big jump in rpm . . . but so long as they can balance it precisely enough it should be very smooth . . . . but as rpm increases so do high frequency vibrations and they can decrease life of the whole pc, not just the hard drive itself.

Agree with concensus though, that surely ssd is the way to go.

If this had come out a year ago if would have been fine but why waste your time with old/dead tech



they should be spending there time doing more porductive things

HOLY LORD! Time to get rid of RAM and have some bad ass paging file (yer yer, joke)

I think you'll find that SSDs aren't quite as ready for mainstream as you think: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/flash-ssd-hard-drive,2000-19.html

(note: I'm currently a big raptor fan. I don't have a velociraptor, but I have both a 74 and 150 "regular" raptor)

When I can buy an SSD with a useful capacity and a reasonable price, I certainly will.

Useful capacity = enough to install games on, but doesn't need to house movies or music. 64GB would probably do it, but I'd prefer 128.

Reasonable price = not much more than a raptor. I'm going to cite US dollars, though I know you guys hafta pay more across the pond. (sorry!) I'll assume that the relative price is consistent (ie the whole world pays twice as much for X than for Y, though the price of each varies around the world) The 150GB raptor is ~$170 USD right now, and the veloci 300GB is ~$300. The only SSD Tom's recommended in the above-linked article was the Samsung, which is at $400 for 32GB and $800 for 64. That's small enough that I can have only a few games installed at once.

My point is that depending on where SSD price and performance stand when this 20k rpm drive becomes available, the 20k drive may very well be worth it!

I wonder how easy or difficult SSD are to RAID. Hmmmm!!!

Originally Posted by Naberius
It will be ok as long as you don't put it in a cheap case, it would shake it to bits.

Originally Posted by 3dHeli
Does sound a big jump in rpm . . . but so long as they can balance it precisely enough it should be very smooth . . . . but as rpm increases so do high frequency vibrations and they can decrease life of the whole pc, not just the hard drive itself.

Use smaller platters.

this is to response from here;

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/06/western-digital-working-on-20-000-rpm-raptor/1

there just is not enough room to put this there




Today there is­ ­not really a reason to worry about SSD speeds. Unless it is based on current RAM, there is no point! It's just not competitive outside niche markets and military and heavy duty industrial use. And for that matter how fast your storage subsystem really is being based of traditional Hard disk drives and how your system or OS currently utilizes it's system Resources. For most people who demand nothing but speed, A live Linux distro loaded completely to RAM will give you a taste of what it is like to run from the very best SSD Based storage systems (I am talking about the same stuff that's on your mobo and the high end stuff Texas Instruments makes for the government that uses REAL DDR-RAM) Todays typical computer will take 16-32 GB of ram. 64-128 on servers.

Considering that most people can make due with a 40 gig HD, a system with 32 gigs of RAM could hold all programs in active memory. Considering that the OS can be made to run the memory in a raid 1 fashion but without the bottle necks of the traditional Hard Disk system. I Don't think any user will ever feel that there is any reason to switch over to SSD's of any nature if we take advantage of the RAM space available on board. (Assuming the OS knows what to load to the memory space in the first place to optimize for performance of applications the user wants to use NOW)

Traditionally old computers loaded everything to RAM in the first place. This made the old Dinosaurs really fast in comparison to there newer and newer brethren. The trend became to make bigger and bigger programs with the RAM of these systems playing catch up. (Bigger hard drives are cheaper to make then bigger memory chips) Because of this, the computer is now designed to load things from the HDD and run them of the HDD's (And only loads the minimal amount of what is needed or the BASE PROGRAM! ) It is this software design that has made the computer "slow". And because of the limited RAM, there is no way to load an entire program to RAM anymore effectively without casing troubles for other systems and programs as well.

If I was a consumer, I would be looking for a computer that can handle at least 32 gigs of RAM and say hello to a striped RAID array. Your RAID system need not be new either. Especially if you are installing the OS on it and using it for that purpose only. Old SCSI 2 and 3 HDD's @ 10K-RPM in a hardware stripped configuration of 14 drives will get you to about 5 m sec avg seek times, transfer rates respectable to 40-50 Mega-Bytes (or like ~35 3.5" floppy disks per second :-) SUSTAINED! , not to mention the data protection of a RAID (1,3,5,10,etc) & cost's of $100 bucks if you shop smart!

RAM has always been the big cost issue in any system and is the number one thing that people should spend there money on and DON'T!!!
In order to max out your RAM, you have to buy the bigger chips that cost more money, or get a board that has allot more slots to accommodate more RAM. The only computers out there that are made to hold all this memory cheaply and effectively is server boards. many have 16 RAM slots and some even more. this way getting to a 16-32 or even 64 GB limit is even less expensive and more attainable. today 2 gigs of RAM cost 20 bucks on sale. 4 gig sticks cost $119 at new egg. that means you can get 8 gigs of RAM for $100 bucks. And 16 gigs of RAM for $200!

Now all you have to do is get something like a Power Mac “G5” that has 8 slots. OR just get a server board. (E-Bay has a used server with 16 gigs of RAM, 4 CPU's for like 900 bucks!) Some of these have 16 slots for memory like the newer Intel Server boards . The down side to most of these boards is that they require ECC memory witch slows down the systems and brings up the cost of memory. If these boards could take regular memory (My word processing is not mission critical neither is my porn) then we all could enjoy the benefits from the advances of SSD's without the high price and lack luster performance of current crop of Pro-consumer SSD's.

The BIOS could act as if was controlling the memory on board to act like a drive rather then just system RAM. That means instant restarts and BIOS level operated RAID to control the rewrite of the data to the HDD's. The really sad thing here is that a board populated by nothing but RAM slots would cost less then $50 bucks to make IN VOLUME! ( Assuming they sell all of them like hot cakes and sell close to 100,000 of them with 128 memory slots ) Then give it connection directly to the high speed buses on a system board. Even a SATA 2 connection would be suffice. You could get a BUNCH of 128-256-512-1-2 gig sticks and use them! It would be cheaper to just use 1-2 GB RAM sticks and populate the whole array with these at 20 bucks a pop or less.

Even the low end user that has very little bones to spare can attain a fast as hell PC in less then a year and have 16-32 gigs of RAM to really rock all corresponding programs he uses. The dark side of this is that programs will continue to bloat to the point that you need all 32 gigs of that RAM just to load windows or use something like Internet explorer.


So in reality, you need more like 128 gigs of RAM to avoid this on a everyday computer. To get that you would need 64 RAM slots, and that's 1200 bucks. About a grand if you buy the stuff in bulk, But who will?

The thing to remember is that THIS IS THE REAL BOTTLE NECK THAT WE CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT RIGHT NOW! and no one wants to look at it.

("It's as plain as the nose on your face"-THX1311... )

RAM! , always been the RAM.... So if you can afford 16 gigs of RAM or even 32 for about a thousand, (still less then some of the SSD's out there and a whole hell of allot more useful and not to mention faster!) You can really take advantage of having a real RAM based SSD's speeds an theoretical advantages for a fraction of the price of the big boy units out there. Or you can just get one of those SATA based RAM disks available for about 200 bucks or less from gigabyte and use it to expand your storage speed that way. (I would use a RAID-1 array to play on the safe side in case the battery power goes dead)

Those out there dreaming of Compact flash IDE arrays are dreaming. they are slower in real world use then traditional HDD's One person at work tried the 8 port IDE adapter with 8 CF cards in a raid stripe 0 array. doing I/O it was slower in all respects to a normal HD in almost every way. SO DO NOT BOTHER TO WASTE YOUR MONEY THIS WAY! DO IT FOR KICKS, NOT PERFORMANCE!

Yea they were the old 512 MB cards, But they were cheap, and we had some laying around so we tried it.

The only other way to have a really fast RAM disk is....

(THEORETICALLY I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS ......Yet...)

is to get a bunch of OS-9 computers load them up with the max amount of RAM, create large RAM disks on all of them. (say like 20 of them) then use OS-X to take those drives and stripe all of them via Ethernet & 1394-over-TCP/IP. (Courtesy of Uni-brains drivers) and use AFP for max file performance. (OS-X is not the best performing network OS) into one really cool logical drive. (albeit the most inefficient, slow, power hungry, loud Wind Tunnel machine EVER! :-)

Thank you.

my response was to big.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=1832909#post1832909

SSD? nah... I'll stay away from it for now, write speeds and capacity arent there yet.

as for using ram, well, this should do.

I thought that was made by Texases Instruments Woops! Don't we all wish we had a DOD budget laying around? That Thing is like Cool million!

Originally Posted by naokaji
SSD? nah... I'll stay away from it for now, write speeds and capacity arent there yet.

as for using ram, well, this should do.

Nice SSD tower until i read this: "Requires 2,500 watts of power"
I was like wtf???

350 Watts if you just want one, can only afford one, Or only have $90,000 and your best hand-shake (Job) ready...

Considering that 15Krpm drives that are what, 15 years old? are still spinning just fine, I'd say WD can make it's drive last at least 5. That said, I want to hear this spin up. Other than the noise it made, I miss my RAID0 SCSI Array :(