20K RPM VelociRaptor

psyopper · Post by **psyopper** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 9:30 am

Holy crow that's fast!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/06/west ... e-on-ssds/

"Same 2.5-inch format, same 3.5-inch housing only now designed to better cancel out the drive's noise"

AuraAllan · Post by **AuraAllan** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 9:43 am

Wow !

That thing must vibrate like crazy.

FartingBob · Post by **FartingBob** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 9:46 am

20k?????? Ive seen 15k drives, but 20k is quite rediculous.
They cant continue to increase the rpm of drives to keep up with the massive improvements in SSD speeds, when SSD's finally come down in price these fast drives are doomed. High capacity drives will last longer, but i suspect they are on limited time as well.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 10:25 am

I will believe it when I see it, there were rumours some (6+) years ago abou the next jump from 15K rpm drives as being around in a couple of years of being 22K rpm drives, that obviously never materialised.

It will be a far easier task to do now rather than a few years ago, especially with 2.5" drives, as platter wobble is not as significant.

I would of course like to see this happen, as it is an improvement of technology, but I wont be holding my breath.

Andy

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 10:53 am

I would much rather see the opposite. A 2TB+ 4200RPM (or something) low power, quiet and cool HDD for storage.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 11:08 am

FartingBob wrote:They cant continue to increase the rpm of drives to keep up with the massive improvements in SSD speeds, when SSD's finally come down in price these fast drives are doomed. High capacity drives will last longer, but i suspect they are on limited time as well.

And the question is... when will that be? The only SSD drives that hold a candle to a regular desktop drive cost upwards of $15/GB (or more) compared to $0.25/GB. Even compared to the new VRaptor at $1/GB, we're talking about a considerable price drop before the mainstream market takes hold.

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 12:01 pm

A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 12:55 pm

Matija wrote:A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.

The part of the market that's looking at high performance SSD drives (or high performance hard drives) is likely people who require a lot of disk access on large files, or gamers. Considering that the latest game titles take up about 5GB a piece... 20GB is enough for two games at best (after Windows installation and leaving enough free space for healthy operation).

If the price wasn't so steep, I'd be very tempted to swap out my WD3200AAKS (two platter) drives for the VRaptors, but I simply couldn't do with anything less than 200GB total system space.

Modo · Post by **Modo** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 1:11 pm

Matija wrote:A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.

Rrright... The vast majority of people haven't heard of that thing called digital camera. They also never, ever install games. Oh, and they probably never rip or download movies and music. (And I won't even mention how much space Windows Vista alone can eat up.)

krille · Post by **krille** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 1:51 pm

So this drive is gonna hum at some 333 Hz? Will this be a more pleasing hum or not? I suspect with the increased noise due to the added friction it won't matter. Would be interesting to see the performance though.

Vicotnik wrote:I would much rather see the opposite. A 2TB+ 4200RPM (or something) low power, quiet and cool HDD for storage.

Would be VERY nice as a Storage disk, for your music, videos, movies and "backups"/"dump". And use something significantly faster as your system disk (OS + installed games and apps), such as a cheap SSD. My wet dream.

From bit-tech:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/06 ... m-raptor/1

SSDs are going to be affordable in the next 12 to 18 months.
/.../
However, our sources said that the drive will be â€˜silentâ€™ â€“ thatâ€™s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device.

Interesting! SSD affordable in the next 12 to 18 months. I wonder what this could mean?

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 2:28 pm

I think SSDs are affordable now, but that is because I do fine with 16GB. For a single HDD/SSD that is not enough for most people, but when a big enough SSD is affordable.. Starting with higher end laptops the demand should rise and development accelerate. I hope so at least.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 3:52 pm

A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast. Smile

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.

I am about to increase my boot partition from 64GB to 128GB because I have run out of space

UT3 is to blame for that - 8GB for a game.....

Andy

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 5:23 pm

Modo wrote:
Matija wrote:A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.
Rrright... The vast majority of people haven't heard of that thing called digital camera. They also never, ever install games. Oh, and they probably never rip or download movies and music. (And I won't even mention how much space Windows Vista alone can eat up.)

I'd imagine in the near future, SSD and mechanical hard drive will both have a place in desktops. Once the 32-64GB SSDs get more affordable I plan to pick one up for OS/games, as the speed increase should be very noticeable. I plan to keep my mechanical drive for multimedia, though. I'd assume most will do the same. Smaller, faster SSD for software that can benefit from the decreased latency and increased throughput, larger, slower mechanical disk for music, movies, etc.

To be honest, I think this new Raptor will be obsolete very quickly, maybe before it even comes out. When you think about it, SSD and Raptor are very similar in philosophy -- higher performance, but at the cost of storage space. If the Raptor is available in large sizes (at least 300GB) and reasonably priced it may have a chance, but otherwise I couldn't see it being very competitive with SSDs, especially if we see some big price drops in the next 12-18 months as the article suggests.

Shadout · Post by **Shadout** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 5:38 pm

Nick Geraedts wrote: Considering that the latest game titles take up about 5GB a piece... 20GB is enough for two games at best (after Windows installation and leaving enough free space for healthy operation).

5GB is outdated, Age of Conan takes an obscene 25 GB :S

Wouldnt live with less than 60 GB 'system + most used app/games' drive, and that would still be incredible small (Just to use the AoC example again, that game will recieve GB upon GB of patches. 60gb could pretty much be filled by Vista + that game alone...)

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 7:15 pm

My main hard drive has less than 100GB of data on it including backups of data from my dad's PC, my girlfriends PC, and two or three revisions of my desktop, save game files, and downloads as I've migrated from one drive to another and not cleaned out all the crud.

I literally have crud from 1997 to 2008 on this one hard drive. I could easily delete thousands of files and not notice their loss. I'm talking old DirectX installers, old Winamp installers, old Acrobat Reader installers, Drivers, Service Packs. Plenty of stuff I'd never need again or could logically segment to offline storage.

I never delete an email I've sent or received unless it has some stupid attachment on it so I have emails in my home inbox going back to 2006 and emails in my prior inbox (inside that inbox) going back to 2002. If I looked hard enough I could probably reconstruct the inbox for the mail client I used before that.

The reality is for performance reasons I buy new hard drives over time and I move data from one drive to the next in the thoughts that if it exists on two drives instead of one I'm protected from data loss. Often I reformat the older of the two drives a few months after the switch but given the number of spare drives I have I may just dedicate several medium size drives to mirroring/archiving some of this crud someday.

End result is so long as the performance drive size march can keep ahead of my crud buildup I don't have to get rid of any of it.

Maybe I'll keep all this crud on a separate PC or an external drive someday but the reality is that I don't have to. The smallest decent drive for sale is hundreds of GB and is sufficient to hold my entire extended family's data from our entire collective past.

Sure we could junk it up with more video but as it is about 25GB of that 100GB is video already.

Since I am not using any intentional compression on my old files (I avoided doublespace/drivespace/disk compression of all types over the years for performance reasons and still don't use it even on XP) and I'm still not low on space I don't see why size of drives matters for a personal PC.

Sure if you want to make a server or a HTPC there is plenty of reason for terrabytes of data. I'm all for the whole DVR concept. I just have no reason to confuse my performance concerns with storage concerns.

No if the price gets cheap enough, the speed is there, and the reliability I'll go SSD even at 64GB. I'd rather have 128GB so I could keep more of my crud and not be as careful about what I brought over but I could manage to tighten the belt on the boot drive and keep some storage of some kind around to move the crud to.

Matija · Post by **Matija** » Fri Jun 06, 2008 11:02 pm

Modo wrote:
Matija wrote:A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.
Rrright... The vast majority of people haven't heard of that thing called digital camera. They also never, ever install games. Oh, and they probably never rip or download movies and music. (And I won't even mention how much space Windows Vista alone can eat up.)

Yes. The vast majority of people don't have digital cameras, don't play games, and couldn't care less about movies and music. Even if they do, it doesn't apply to their office computers, and they'll only have a gig of mp3s on their home computer, or a point-and-shoot camera that makes 500 KB JPEGs.

Computer enthusiasts are not the same as regular users.

nutball · Post by **nutball** » Sat Jun 07, 2008 1:34 am

I can't help but feel that this is a development which will have a very short life, if it even makes it to market.

The market for expensive high-performance hard-drives is the first that's going to be eaten away by SSDs. I doubt it'll be more than a year or two before 15k SAS drives start to look like a curious choice. SATA, 20k, why would the hell would you do that?

Sounds to me like WD are getting desperate.

Rewdoalb · Post by **Rewdoalb** » Sat Jun 07, 2008 11:48 am

Matija wrote:
Modo wrote:
Matija wrote:A regular desktop drive needs to be 20-30 GB in size and doesn't have to be fast.

The vast majority of people don't need anything more.
Rrright... The vast majority of people haven't heard of that thing called digital camera. They also never, ever install games. Oh, and they probably never rip or download movies and music. (And I won't even mention how much space Windows Vista alone can eat up.)
Yes. The vast majority of people don't have digital cameras, don't play games, and couldn't care less about movies and music. Even if they do, it doesn't apply to their office computers, and they'll only have a gig of mp3s on their home computer, or a point-and-shoot camera that makes 500 KB JPEGs.

Computer enthusiasts are not the same as regular users.

I made the mistake of partitioning my dad's HD with a 20GB "boot" partition a little more than a year ago. No games or anything, except for files which are forced to be on the boot drive. Anytime I install something, I choose the other, larger partition. And yet I have to run CCleaner and Disk Cleanup anytime he wants to defragment (requires 15% free space), because there isn't room on the partition anymore.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Sat Jun 07, 2008 8:46 pm

My main/only system drive for my computer is only 40gb. Though i will admit, i did have a little problem trying to install both WoW and COD4. But i got 5gb left, and thats with a 7gb mp3 collection.

For the most part 40gb is plenty, but i have wanted more recently. I've decided to go with the 300gb velociraptor and find someway to put it in a 2.5" SQD to keep it quiet. I doubt i'll ever need more than 300gb anytime soon. It may very well be the last spinning magnetic storage device i ever buy. Though i might get a second velociraptor for my wifes computer if i really like it.

As for the 20k version. I wouldnt hold my breath. You gotta remember, its not even a sample yet. At this stage of development its probably mostly just an idea among engineers at WD. It will be at least a year before you see a working sample, let alone a production ready unit. At which point SSD may be large/inexpensive enough to make it not even worth putting into production at all.

yefi · Post by **yefi** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 12:31 pm

Matija wrote:The vast majority of people don't need anything more.

640Kb of memory should be enough for anybody, et cetera, et cetera.

m^2 · Post by **m^2** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 1:35 pm

I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..

Vicotnik · Post by **Vicotnik** » Sun Jun 08, 2008 10:49 pm

yefi wrote:640Kb of memory should be enough for anybody, et cetera, et cetera.

640kB was enough at one time, just as 300GB is overkill for most people today.

No-one is trying to limit the size of future drives, so your comment makes no sense really.

Nick Geraedts · Post by **Nick Geraedts** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 7:01 am

m^2 wrote:I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..

The smaller the size, the lower the platter density, the lower the maximum transfer speed. A single 320GB drive would run circles around any 8GB hard drive (note: hard drive - SSD's don't count).

That being said - you could go for a 4x8GB SSD setup if you're serious about that.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 9:08 am

m^2 wrote:I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..

@Nick, you have to assume he meant 8GB SSDs, nobody makes FAST 8GB drives. You did notice he said FAST didn't you?

@m^2, you probably don't want RAID 5 on SSDs and you don't want RAID 5 on your boot drive.

1. RAID 5 penalizes writes more than RAID 1 which penalizes writes more than a single drive.
2. SSDs already have a write penalty, combining that with RAID 5 is not going to give you good results compared to your other options.

The better way to do 4 drives for a boot partition would be RAID 10 aka RAID 1+0 (make two RAID 1 arrays then join those two arrays into a RAID 0 array). With any luck your drive controller will do the work for you but if not do RAID 1 pairs in the RAID controller and RAID 0 in the OS. If you don't have a RAID controller you just have to buy two bigger drives and do RAID 1 instead.

Of course at that point you'll want 4x 16GB drives as RAID 10 eats half your drives for parity. 4x16=32 when you do RAID 10 math.

The other point is that assuming the price is similar it's a lot simpler to just RAID 1 a pair of 32GB SSDs instead of RAID 10 on four 16GB SSDs.

Essentially each individual SSD is a well disguised raid in a box. You don't have to get too fancy RAIDing them up as they are already heavily engineered to handle performance and reliability issues inherent in flash memory.

Your best performance might be to RAID 0 them but I just don't trust SSD reliability enough to do that.

I'll either stick with a single drive for cost reasons or I'll do RAID 1.

I'd be curious to see a RAID 1 array made from one single platter 150GB velociraptor + 1 64GB SSD compared the the RAID 1 arrays of two of each. Would the mixed drive types give us the best of both worlds, the worst of both worlds, or just a total mixed bag of randomness?

I suppose you'd want to break the mirror to defrag the hard drive and then mirror back to the SSD after the defrag. But then again how often do you defrag nowdays? Server 2008 and Vista have automatic defrag but you could turn that off.

yefi · Post by **yefi** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 10:20 am

Vicotnik wrote:
yefi wrote:640Kb of memory should be enough for anybody, et cetera, et cetera.
640kB was enough at one time, just as 300GB is overkill for most people today.

No-one is trying to limit the size of future drives, so your comment makes no sense really.

Those guys with 1 meg of ram knew a good thing when they saw it; they knew that soon that 640K would be inadequate for their needs and they were future-proofed against it. It's like a lady--sure you can get bang for your buck now and opt for the secondhand model, but you're not thinking about years down the line after deterioration. Whoops, did I say a lady, I meant a car.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 10:46 am

dhanson865 wrote:
m^2 wrote:I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..
@Nick, you have to assume he meant 8GB SSDs, nobody makes FAST 8GB drives. You did notice he said FAST didn't you?

Actually, quite the opposite. He said "would be" and "the latest drives are not that small anymore". Obviously, he's talking about hard drives, because SSDs do indeed come that small.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 12:25 pm

IsaacKuo wrote:
dhanson865 wrote:
m^2 wrote:I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..
@Nick, you have to assume he meant 8GB SSDs, nobody makes FAST 8GB drives. You did notice he said FAST didn't you?
Actually, quite the opposite. He said "would be" and "the latest drives are not that small anymore". Obviously, he's talking about hard drives, because SSDs do indeed come that small.

Whatever he is talking about, he is talking about in the sense of "if someone would make one and sell it today".

Do you really think any drive manufacturer would bother making a 8GB hard drive with a 150GB platter ? (the smallest platter I know of currently in production is the 150GB velociraptor). He can just buy a 150GB drive and short stroke it himself to get the 8GB partition he wants and then RAID it up.

We are just arguing about how he said it. You surely don't think he meant digging up old 20GB platters and putting them in a current drive casing with a SATA interface do you?

I still can't see how you can read his post and not group "fast" in with the "8GB" part of his desires.

IsaacKuo · Post by **IsaacKuo** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 12:37 pm

It's really quite simple. He wishes they still made hard drives that small.

Why doesn't he just buy a bunch of 150gig Raptors? Presumably because that's expensive. He probably thinks that if the drives were smaller, then they'd be less expensive (while not necessarily being slower).

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Mon Jun 09, 2008 2:27 pm

Well for what it's worth the 150GB Velociraptor I was thinking about isn't out yet so I don't really know what they'll charge for it.

The product page is WD1500GLFS and it can also be seen in http://www.wdc.com/en/library/2178-001010.pdf

Of course the question is when will they release it and the best answer I've seen so far is

nick8571 on [H] wrote:No need - I can answer on WD's behalf:

"We intend to release the 150GB VelociRaptor once the initial buying frenzy for the WD3000GLFS has died down, and our market analysts are sure releasing the WD1500GLFS won't significantly hurt sales of the dearer model with its higher margins. We don't know ourselves yet when that will be, and we certainly wouldn't tell you if we did, because actually we'd rather you bought the 300GB version, preferably at a high price as soon as possible after its release."

m^2 · Post by **m^2** » Tue Jun 10, 2008 5:56 am

I wanted SSDs obviously, 8GB hdds are very slow...
And are there any fast 8GB SSDs? Mtron starts at 16, Memoright at 32, OCZ at 64.

dhanson865 wrote:
m^2 wrote:I use 20GB for my system with a lot of programs and several games.
RAID5 of 4 fast 8GB drives with a good controller would be perfect for me. I don't like the fact that the latest drives are not that small anymore..
1. RAID 5 penalizes writes more than RAID 1 which penalizes writes more than a single drive.

You're right, I didn't think about it. TMS uses it (RAID3 IIRC, but it's no difference), but I wouldn't trust consumer disk wear leveling. So 1 and 10 seem to be a better option.

dhanson865 wrote:2. SSDs already have a write penalty, combining that with RAID 5 is not going to give you good results compared to your other options.

That's why I said that I want a good controller. For home use, even 32MB cache should easily solve the problem with small writes. And RAID5 has better str than 10.
Anyway, prices are still too high.

IsaacKuo wrote:It's really quite simple. He wishes they still made hard drives that small.

Why doesn't he just buy a bunch of 150gig Raptors? Presumably because that's expensive. He probably thinks that if the drives were smaller, then they'd be less expensive (while not necessarily being slower).

Yes, the bold part is correct. And that's true with SSDs.