10,000 Rpm 2.5" Hard Disk

[Guest Reimar]

WD's new 10,000 RPM 2.5-inch drives still aren't for laptops

Despite reducing power consumption by 35 percent, Western Digital's new 10,000 RPM 2.5-inch hard drives won't be making an appearance in laptops. The updated VelociRaptor line, with capacities up to 300GB, are designed for 1U and 2U servers.

The new VelociRaptor drives sport a SATA 3 Gb/s interface with 16 MB cache, technology that optimizes the drive if there is vibration, and a reliability rating of 1.4 million hours MTBF. WD is going after a new market for smaller drives in servers, where 3.5-inch drives were previously the norm.

The drives offer 4.2ms read times and 4.7ms write times, with 0.7ms track-to-track seek time. Transfer rates are 120MB/second, and the drive has an average latency of 3ms.

"WD's new WD VelociRaptor, designed specifically for the enterprise in an energy efficient 2.5-inch form factor, gives system OEMs and end users a new storage option to consider to meet growing storage requirements," commented IDC's research director for hard drives John Rydning.

Although 10,000 RPM would provide additional performance for notebook users, the higher speeds would also drain the battery faster and produce more heat. 7,200 RPM drives have been available for years in portables, but 5,400 RPM models remain the most common.

For the moment, the 2.5-inch 10,000 RPM drives also remain too big for use in notebooks, with a height of 15mm; the standard size for portables is 9.5mm. WD is, however, offering a 3.5-inch casing so the new drives can be used in desktop environments.

OEMs are evaluating the new VelociRaptor drives later this month, with commercial availability slated for the end of the month. Pricing has not yet been announced.

Source

[nikster]

Neat.

But the space to watch is SSDs right now. They run in laptops, and the newest OCZ drives cost around $500 for 128GB with near-zero seek times, and over 100MB/s read/write. In a recent test vs the previous WD Caviar mentioned above the SSD came out equal in transfer rates, and faster in seek times, while also consuming not more power than a typical laptop drive. Previously, fast SSDs sold for $6,000 so this is a tenfold drop.

And that's without the OS or the drivers being optimized for SSDs which, lacking a spinning disk, have pretty different characteristics from HDs.

I expect some very exciting news in that area soon, even better than those OCZ drives

[dave_boo]

Neat.

But the space to watch is SSDs right now. They run in laptops, and the newest OCZ drives cost around $500 for 128GB with near-zero seek times, and over 100MB/s read/write. In a recent test vs the previous WD Caviar mentioned above the SSD came out equal in transfer rates, and faster in seek times, while also consuming not more power than a typical laptop drive. Previously, fast SSDs sold for $6,000 so this is a tenfold drop.

And that's without the OS or the drivers being optimized for SSDs which, lacking a spinning disk, have pretty different characteristics from HDs.

Perhaps for you Windows users. A few tricks like setting your controller to Write Back, changing your kernel to use a 'noop' scheduler, getting away from 'atime' (hey if Linus recommends it!) and, as counter-intutive as it sounds, stop using a journaled filesystem. Reason being is that you take a performance hit when you do, and since the SSD's controller already monitors individual sectors, why would you want the job done twice? Even better would be to use two SSD in RAID1, since Linux does a pretty good job of parallelising reads on that setup.

I expect some very exciting news in that area soon, even better than those OCZ drives

Really exiciting news would be for them to get down to a price parity with conventional disks!

[niller74]

It will be a while before we see SDD replace traditional disks in mass storage systems, but for the notebook/desktop market it is definitely the road ahead.

My new media box will run on a SDD disk if I can get one that I like. If not the good old CF card is always available as a read only solution

However four of the 10k WD disks would be sweet in a little RAID.

[crev]

Based on what I've read, SSD in theory should be faster than traditional HD but based on my experience, it is somewhat the same if not slower. I got a Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and my boot time goes from 20 seconds after fresh install of XP to 30 seconds after all the drivers installed to 40 seconds after some applications installed like Photoshop and MS Office. Now it is close to 1 minute after more apps installed. It has 1GB ram and 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor so its not the Ram nor the processor speed.

[nikster]

Based on what I've read, SSD in theory should be faster than traditional HD but based on my experience, it is somewhat the same if not slower. I got a Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and my boot time goes from 20 seconds after fresh install of XP to 30 seconds after all the drivers installed to 40 seconds after some applications installed like Photoshop and MS Office. Now it is close to 1 minute after more apps installed. It has 1GB ram and 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor so its not the Ram nor the processor speed.

Before these OCZ drives I was referring to above, SSDs were either extremely expensive, or extremely slow. Guess what's in your cheapo netbook...

Edited July 31, 2008 by nikster

[dave_boo]

Based on what I've read, SSD in theory should be faster than traditional HD but based on my experience, it is somewhat the same if not slower. I got a Acer Aspire One with 8GB SSD and my boot time goes from 20 seconds after fresh install of XP to 30 seconds after all the drivers installed to 40 seconds after some applications installed like Photoshop and MS Office. Now it is close to 1 minute after more apps installed. It has 1GB ram and 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor so its not the Ram nor the processor speed.

Before these OCZ drives I was referring to above, SSDs were either extremely expensive, or extremely slow. Guess what's in your cheapo netbook...

Something like this that offers 'up to' 25 MB/s reads and 8 MB/s writes?

Edited July 31, 2008 by dave_boo