Record-Making Hard Disk: 750 GB Caviar Posts 95 MB/s

They need to pull sometihng out the HAT, if any truth in Seagate are making 10k and if SolidState is nosing in, the last time you told us about they were possibly going to make a laptop HDD, thats bad move IMO, desktop is more changed out than lappy's, they would not sell as many, least I was correct about the 32MB cache but thats already here on the 1TB drives, I would like to see 15K SATA300 32MB WD Raptor :), I know they wont go 12K as SCSI tried that and got major problems as of Harmonics, unless modern tech has fixed the issues or they can go somewhere in between 12K and 15K.
 
The Raptor forms such a miniscule portion of WD's sales that I doubt there'll be much more innovation in it. The money is in pushing up densities to reduce costs. I think this trend of super-high throughput 7200RPM drives is going to ramp up as densities drop.

7200RPM technology is solid, proven and most importantly economical.
 
15K will definitely not happen. WD are lacking big time in the 2.5" market so unfortunately then have to put the focus there. They did it with retail and it's worked wonders. MyBooks are available literally everywhere! The other issue with the 3.5" market is although there is the most scope for development, the drives keep getting cheaper and cheaper so they make less money.

Capacity is also a huge factor now like I said in the other thread so although insanely quick for the enthusiast market, it does not make one little difference for the mainstream market where WD actually make the money.
 
mosfet said:
The Raptor forms such a miniscule portion of WD's sales that I doubt there'll be much more innovation in it. The money is in pushing up densities to reduce costs. I think this trend of super-high throughput 7200RPM drives is going to ramp up as densities drop.

7200RPM technology is solid, proven and most importantly economical.


Then why do they even make Raptors, the answer is because it does sell and it cost a premium and they have no SCSI market to hurt.
The 7200rpm HDD's are far too slow for todays PC's, they always have been the bottleneck of a modern RIG but more so now, there is little poiint in getting your CPU/RAM and GPU OC'd through the roof if the HDD cant keep up, it will only be good for 3D Mark scores :p

Also 2x 150GiG (300GiG) drives in Raid is enough space for me, who should need to keep more on a PC at any given time?, should be backed up to external HDD's, they could get more space onto Raptors using perpendicular tech which it seems by my post above to speed it up also, they did also hint at using the SATA300 interface once it matured so skipped for the Raptors last time.

Slackworth, we understand about the enthusiast part but so is certain CPU/RAM and GPU's they dont sell near as many as low/mid range models but still make money of them as of premium.
 
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helmutcheese said:
Then why do they even make Raptors, the answer is because it does sell and it cost a premium and they have no SCSI market to hurt.
The 7200rpm HDD's are far too slow for todays PC's, they always have been the bottleneck of a modern RIG but more so now,

It's a money making part of their business, but it forms a tiny percentage of their overall sales.

It's a myth that spindle speed is the bottleneck of hard drive performance. This is quite untrue. I've got a couple of 10k RPM Seagate Cheetahs in a drawer here that in RAID0 have a lower average throughput than this new WD 7200RPM drive. The heat issues and spindle size constraints that 10k and 15k disks have to overcome are costly and hinder the kind of speed and capacity innovation we've seen in the 7200 and 5400 markets.

Of course seek speed is an issue, but with larger caches, 2 and 4GB of RAM and command queuing this is less of an issue.

ther eis little poiint in getting your CPU/RAM and GPU OC through the roof if the HDD cant keep up, it will only be good for 3d mark scores :P

With or without an HDD bottleneck you could argue that there's no point pushing your other components to the limit other than for benchmarks.
 
helmutcheese said:
Slackworth, we understand about the enthusiast part but so is certain CPU/RAM and GPU's they dont sell near as many as low/mid range models but still make money of them as of premium.

The CPU and GPU vendors can afford to have more enthusiast based products. Think about the latest Intel processor. Rough cost on release is around £500-600. Compare this to a Raptor 150GB and you're looking at £150-£180. The R&D costs are hurrendous on new products and when they're not going to be selling that many it takes a long while to get it back and obviously trying something new could also be a complete flop.

Unfortunately the enthusiast market is simply too small for the ultimate products to be changed constantly. We sell a lot of Raptors but in comparison to the normal drives it is naff all. If you go to an industrial level the numbers are incredible. Not one e-tailer in the UK could ever touch industrial sized customers. Take away these customers and you would find many of these vendors going straight down the drain.
 
Seagate won't release the 500GB and 750GB 7200.11s for a little while as they still have huge stocks of the .10s. 1TB should be available in the next 1-2 weeks but I reckon a month or two at least before we see any low cap.
 
WD were a bit daft with their pricing on the Raptor X though. Trying to get £50 for a plastic window really wasn't a good plan. They eventually realised it was just far too much.

Even at £237, it's still only a 3rd of what the ultimate GPUs and CPUs cost yet probably cost no more to make.
 
There was a post on here a number of months back that a WD rep had been into OcUK and mentioned that Raptor 2 is in progress. Sure it was said 15k, 64 mb cache and up to 300 GB.
 
Atom said:
There was a post on here a number of months back that a WD rep had been into OcUK and mentioned that Raptor 2 is in progress. Sure it was said 15k, 64 mb cache and up to 300 GB.

That was me. 2 out of 3 were correct. WD have no plans whatsoever to do 15K. Even so, up until recently 300GB and 32MB Cache 3.5" was on the cards but the latest is that they will not bother with another 3.5" drive and then go for a 2.5" instead.
 
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