Any serious competition to the Seagate 7200.10 coming out?

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Caporegime
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In the 7200 rpm SATA stakes, these drives seem to win in all departments. They're competitively priced, fast (perhaps the fastest?), relatively quiet, and reliable. Can anything touch them either now or in the imminent future?

I have WD drives currently and they've always been excellent which basically means I've had no problems, but when I upgrade I would be interested to know if there were any imminent breakthroughs in SATA technology which would, for example, mean 10k rpm SATA drives becoming price competitive and quiet.
 
The larger current (e.g. 500Gb T7K500 of which I've got one) Hitachi drives marginally beat the Seagates (but it really is marginal.) IIRC, the next generation of Hitachi's 7K1000 will also use perpendicular recording with even higher recording densities and promises to be something really special. Of course, Seagate will likely bring out new drives too to counter. :-)
 
that is actually a good harddrive just need the interface to be sata 3.0 and add another 16mb cache but the cost is silly, i still think it is nice to see perpendicular recording technology being added to more drives, have had these two seagates.10's in raid for 6 months now and not a problem. :)
 
Quick hijack: Why can't they just make the spindle speeds faster? I mean, take a current 7200.10 and turn it into a 10000.11 or something? (over clock your HDD anyone?! :rolleyes: ) Obviously I don't know the ins' and out of hard drive tech, but surely it shouldn't be that expensive to do!
 
Bin Boy said:
that is actually a good harddrive just need the interface to be sata 3.0 and add another 16mb cache but the cost is silly, i still think it is nice to see perpendicular recording technology being added to more drives, have had these two seagates.10's in raid for 6 months now and not a problem. :)
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Why does it need to be SATA3?? That Cheetah I linked to is as fast as HDDs get and even it can't saturate the bandwidth available to SATA1!


Gamezy said:
Why can't they just make the spindle speeds faster?
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There are a number of things which limit the spindle speed, both technically and in business terms. The demand for fast disks from consumers is a tiny proportion of the manufacturer's business, the vast majority of their disks got to box shifters - the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of this world. The return on investment from developing 15krpm SATA drives is probably too low for the manufacturers to contemplate.

Technically 15krpm disks are difficult, they generate huge amounts of heat from the air friction caused by the rotating platters and they're not quiet. Neither of these are conducive to home use. To reduce the heat issue the platters are about 1/2" to 3/4" smaller than those in 7200rpm drives hence the available space for data is less - Seagate have been making 15k SCSI drives for years but the new 15k5 range is the first to crack 300Gb.
 
Might be down to the way that storage is architected these days. The SAN I'm currently using in work has a huge amount of cache RAM (32Gb+) up front so for frequently accessed data it comes out of the cache so the seek times of the disks aren't as important.

It may be easier to increase transfer rates by increasing the data density rather than looking at bearings etc that'll do 20krpm. In an enterprise environment throwing more disks into a RAID array or striping across more arrays in a SAN will give a performance boost without new technology being required.
 
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