Just wanted to pose a quick question, 10000rpm hard disks have been around for a while is there any reason why the mainstream consumer has yet to see an affordable sata 10000rpm HD solution. Why is it that after 4-5 years of sata hd's that access times and read/write speeds haven't improved at a similar rate to other components. I know Hard drives aren't considered to be as crucial to the speed and power of a system as say a gfx card, processor and memory and sata 2 has come out but imo it is. Just wanted to know is there any particular reason for this?
Why aren't 10000rpm sata HD's Standard?
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Soldato
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From what I've heard, most manufacturers dont want to compromise their SCSI products. WD dont produce any SCSI drives, so have no problems with that.
Because of the faster speed of a 10,000 rpm drive you need smaller platters to reduce friction and heat when being used, also higher RPM drives are noisier and most people want quiet systems. This means the capacity of the harddrive is smaller. Most people prefer a higher capacity harddrive as the extra speed from 10k RPM drives isn't that much more than 7,200 drives, so 7,200 is the sweet spot between size and speed. Most servers get around this by using multiple 10k-15k drives to have the best performance and have a large storage amount, but this isn't what normal users want because of the extra noise, heat and cost.
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...however there are many 2.5" SAS drives (in fact I have and use four) which are as quiet as desktop 3.5" drives, are cooler and use a lot less power. There are also large capacity drives, e.g. 300GB 15K drives, however as most servers use RAID arrays, there is no point making high density platters.
Caporegime
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As Vai said its 99% down to heat and capacity.
the increase in speed exponentially increase heat and temps so you MUST have smaller platters and lower capacity. 10k's do tend to be louder and as shown there are 7200rpm drives out that are faster in quite a few benchies and almost all "normal" home user situations.
the lower capacity and smaller platters mean hits in performance on long reads and faster rotation means increased performance for multiple small file read. quite frankly you do not need the later in 99.9% of home use situations.
you also tend to find less tested but if you set up a 7200 drive formatted with larger sectors then load speeds are better. a couple very good 7200 drives raid 0'd and with largish sectors are insanely fast and definately the best set up you can use at home.
there isn't a single situation where for me the raptors win, for any raptor setup i can get two 7200 drives in raid and increase capacity or if you're a bit wimpy you can raid 5 with more drives, same price, more speed probably still a little higher capacity for the same price. so far i've been using raid 0 for, 5 years probably, with a good 30 odd drives and not one failure. hard drive failures are still pretty few and far between, failure is only really an issue for massively important data, either like basic small work files that should and can be easily backed up, or massive amounts of video data for work and then you should use raid 5/10 anyway and again 7200 raided is faster as higher sustained transfers and needed big capacity.
raptors are a gimmick, competing with scsi isn't an issue.
nvidia and ati sell the same cards under firegl/quadro brands for 3-4 times the cost, sometimes more and the difference is drivers and yet people still pay for the higher warranty and official support. business's just pay for the stuff aimed at them so 10k rpm drives aimed at home users with 3 year warranties with sata interface wouldn't affect scsi sales much at all.
the increase in speed exponentially increase heat and temps so you MUST have smaller platters and lower capacity. 10k's do tend to be louder and as shown there are 7200rpm drives out that are faster in quite a few benchies and almost all "normal" home user situations.
the lower capacity and smaller platters mean hits in performance on long reads and faster rotation means increased performance for multiple small file read. quite frankly you do not need the later in 99.9% of home use situations.
you also tend to find less tested but if you set up a 7200 drive formatted with larger sectors then load speeds are better. a couple very good 7200 drives raid 0'd and with largish sectors are insanely fast and definately the best set up you can use at home.
there isn't a single situation where for me the raptors win, for any raptor setup i can get two 7200 drives in raid and increase capacity or if you're a bit wimpy you can raid 5 with more drives, same price, more speed probably still a little higher capacity for the same price. so far i've been using raid 0 for, 5 years probably, with a good 30 odd drives and not one failure. hard drive failures are still pretty few and far between, failure is only really an issue for massively important data, either like basic small work files that should and can be easily backed up, or massive amounts of video data for work and then you should use raid 5/10 anyway and again 7200 raided is faster as higher sustained transfers and needed big capacity.
raptors are a gimmick, competing with scsi isn't an issue.
nvidia and ati sell the same cards under firegl/quadro brands for 3-4 times the cost, sometimes more and the difference is drivers and yet people still pay for the higher warranty and official support. business's just pay for the stuff aimed at them so 10k rpm drives aimed at home users with 3 year warranties with sata interface wouldn't affect scsi sales much at all.
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how come there are 15k 300GB discs then surly these would get super hot?
Soldato
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Active cooling is a must with those drives, air conditioned room is a definite plus too 
Vai said:
But if your shrewd you can get some quality scsi bargains on ebay!
I bought 2 x 73Gb 15k/U320 Maxtor Atlas II's for £100 with FREE postage
They still have 2 years warranty and are running perfect in my 'very hot' loft server
You can get DUAL channel Adaptec 39320's for between £50-£70 so going 15k scsi isn’t that expensive if you shop about!
Also, why aren't there 15k SATA drives? As far as I'm aware there is no technical reason, SATA1 easily has enough bandwidth, let alone SATA2 (don't get me started on that). If WD (whom have no SCSI division, so its not a encroaching on profits issue) made 15k SATA drives I'd have gone for those instead of buying SCSI - are WD not up to the job of making such drives or is there a reason.
Caporegime
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because as per usual theres very little point in making something for 0.0001% of the market. 15k would mean higher cost, developement costs, higher failure rates and more heat.
if you up the size of the platter to increase capacity, or if you increase the platter capacity by better manufacturing you increase cost in the later, or heat in the former.
there are always, with every single design for anything, trade off's to be made and those trade off's are generally measured out to produce a product at whatever price point they are aiming for.
to make a 15k raptor you increase heat dramatically, you increase failure rates, which mean same warranty would cause a big increase in price, you need more expensive and better quality, faster moving reading heads and higher quality parts to deal with the vibration and movement.
but most people don't care what drive they have in, most people won't see any difference between a 5400 laptop drive and a 15k sata drive because opening a 0.2kb e-mail doesn't take long anyway. even with gaming you'd probably be talking about small small decrease in loading times, nothing major a couple seconds.
now the thing is, also all the companies are working on solid state, and why there aren't cheap solid state drives out already with massive speeds and fairly cheap i really have no clue, the technology is there for silent, massively faster high capacity solid state drives.
you get the feeling that companies wouldn't exactly want to have a super fast solid state drive fairly cheap with millions of ide/sata drives in stock waiting to sell.
the thing is, the memory chips in the solid state drives are tiny, this is the biggest difference with platters in normal hard drives. all they need to do is essentially set up a raid 0 array within the drive on an internal controller so the data comes in then gets written to multiple memory chips at the same time. the current speeds for read/write are very similar to your high end usb memory sticks. if you simply stack those chips up as with raid 0 you double, quadrouple, those speeds and access times are already insanely low on solid state. the size of the chips, you could fit dozens and dozens into an internal 3.5" drive, all raided and you would have speeds 10 times faster than current sata drives.
if you up the size of the platter to increase capacity, or if you increase the platter capacity by better manufacturing you increase cost in the later, or heat in the former.
there are always, with every single design for anything, trade off's to be made and those trade off's are generally measured out to produce a product at whatever price point they are aiming for.
to make a 15k raptor you increase heat dramatically, you increase failure rates, which mean same warranty would cause a big increase in price, you need more expensive and better quality, faster moving reading heads and higher quality parts to deal with the vibration and movement.
but most people don't care what drive they have in, most people won't see any difference between a 5400 laptop drive and a 15k sata drive because opening a 0.2kb e-mail doesn't take long anyway. even with gaming you'd probably be talking about small small decrease in loading times, nothing major a couple seconds.
now the thing is, also all the companies are working on solid state, and why there aren't cheap solid state drives out already with massive speeds and fairly cheap i really have no clue, the technology is there for silent, massively faster high capacity solid state drives.
you get the feeling that companies wouldn't exactly want to have a super fast solid state drive fairly cheap with millions of ide/sata drives in stock waiting to sell.
the thing is, the memory chips in the solid state drives are tiny, this is the biggest difference with platters in normal hard drives. all they need to do is essentially set up a raid 0 array within the drive on an internal controller so the data comes in then gets written to multiple memory chips at the same time. the current speeds for read/write are very similar to your high end usb memory sticks. if you simply stack those chips up as with raid 0 you double, quadrouple, those speeds and access times are already insanely low on solid state. the size of the chips, you could fit dozens and dozens into an internal 3.5" drive, all raided and you would have speeds 10 times faster than current sata drives.
Just thought I'd clear a few things up:
Firstly raw read/write speeds have been increasing. Not at a huge rate, but steadily. These increases have nothing to do with spindle speeds (RPM).
As many people have pointed out it's not economical to increase RPM across the board - throughput increases are much more easily achieved by increasing the platter density. This has the obvious advantage of increasing capacity - the most marketable feature of a drive.
99% of consumers won't even realise that different HDDs vary in read/write speed, to them capacity (or capacity/cost ratio) is by far the most important specification and as such manufacturers concentrate their efforts on increasing it.
SS-89 said:
Firstly raw read/write speeds have been increasing. Not at a huge rate, but steadily. These increases have nothing to do with spindle speeds (RPM).
As many people have pointed out it's not economical to increase RPM across the board - throughput increases are much more easily achieved by increasing the platter density. This has the obvious advantage of increasing capacity - the most marketable feature of a drive.
99% of consumers won't even realise that different HDDs vary in read/write speed, to them capacity (or capacity/cost ratio) is by far the most important specification and as such manufacturers concentrate their efforts on increasing it.
drunkenmaster said:
I think you have completley missed the point of 10k+ drives drunkenmaster. Sure you scan scale up sequential read/write speed by adding more SATA drives or increasing data density but ramping up the spindle speed allows you to perform more random I/Os. This is important, not only in database type applications but also for general deskop performance (although it is greatly mitigated by clever data prefetching techniques and NCQ)
now maybe my acquaintances are of a biased sampling, but half the people i know with pc's bought a raptor because its the fastest drive they can conveniently use with their motherboard. If someone made 15k SATA disks, and OcUK stocked them, I'd be willing to bet hard cash that they'll sell more than 1 per 1000000 hard disk sales (0.0001%)drunkenmaster said:
Have you tried running a large game on a 15k drive/RAID?drunkenmaster said:
so why don't they? The same principle applies to HD's too: read/write all tracks in the cylinder, striping the sectors - but they don't, why.drunkenmaster said:
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