Faster rpm IDE drive

[Powerdoc]

The lattest generation of HD has really good data transfer rate, but there is one aera where IDE HD did not progress : the access time.
Don't you think it's time for the market to release IDE HD going faster than 7200 rpm, why not a 10 000 rpm HD ?

I guess it's certainly a cost reason, but is there any reason who prevent faster RPM for IDE drives ?

[murbot]

They would make the MDD Power Macs a little too loud, IMO.

[Amorph]

10k drives are loud, indeed, and they have to be made really well to be reliable. In fact, even the ones that are made well don't last all that long by consumer standards. Usually what you do is keep them running at all times, because startup is the most stressful thing you can do to a HDD, and most people don't want the whine of a 10k drive going 24/7 for some odd reason.

Storage density's going up, and that also increases performance - at least for large files on non-fragmented disks, anyway. It doesn't help rotational latency, but then I think the best answer to that issue is not to store your data on a speed-freak turntable in the first place. They're working on that.

In the mean time, OS X caches files in RAM when possible, so get lots and lots of RAM. Problem solved, sort of. ;)

[ 12-08-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>

[xype]

[quote]Originally posted by Powerdoc:
<strong>I guess it's certainly a cost reason, but is there any reason who prevent faster RPM for IDE drives ?</strong><hr></blockquote>

I think I did read some place that the IDE drives can not have much greater speeds because then you would simply run in danger of damaging the hardware (eg, spinning till it starts falling apart).

You can however use a RAID system to strip the data speed up the read/writes trough that.

[TommyBrando]

If im not mistake, its a bandwith issue on the IDE bus. SCSI can handle it but IDE cant.....


.....or so the germans would have us believe <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />

[Amorph]

There is no single IDE drive that comes anywhere near saturating a modern ATA bus. In fact, there's room for two.

That's not the problem.

[Miami Craig]

Damn germans <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />

[Outsider]

10K and 15K rpm SCSI drives are more prone to failure in my experience. We have an assortment of Sun and Compaq servers that include 10K and 15K drives and 3 drives have failed this year. Although they were part of RAID systems and were easily replaced, it could cause considerable data loss if used in simpler workstations.

[Clive]

[quote]Originally posted by Miami Craig:
<strong>Damn germans <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>

Sorry, what's this "german" crap all about? Jealous that they adopted the Euro and kicked the septic dollar into touch?

Makes me laugh when I see "the biggest economy in the world" tagged onto the US, not since January 2002 it's not!

[TommyBrando]

easy, tiger. its obviously a refrence to a running joke norm macdonald used to use on the weekend update of saturday night live. get a sense of humor. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" />

[dobby]

SCSI and IDE drives use the same platters and motors (and heads I think). The logic board is different.
SCSI can have 7 drives on narrow bus or 15 on wide (DON'T mix them though!).
IDE is limited to a bus length of 35cm. Probably why you only get 2 per machine or 3 in one of those monstrosity towers.
IDE IS fast. I think its more a throughput issue as SCSI has a couple of things (error correction, read ahead, command queing etc) that help it perform better when used. This means reading a 4MB file will probably have identical times on both a IDE and SCSI drives but reading/writing 1000 4MB files the SCSI drive will be faster.

Dobby.

BTW. One of our computer centers has thousands of 10/15K SCSI disks and we have perhaps one or 2 failures a month on a bad month.

EDIT - Sorry I will get back to the topic. SCSI 10K or 15K drives have a higher throughput and therefore can handle 25+ tracks (which means a higher track count). IDE (currently) do not, don't know why.

P.S. And for those who smoke in the presence of their computer or at leat their exposed hard disk (cover off etc). As the disk heads only sit about 15 micron from the surface of the disk, please don't smoke, a smoke molecule is about 80 micron and yes it can cause a drive crash if you blew smoke onto the drive. (Although the average dust particle your have probably killed it by the time you leant forward, but it sounds dangerous).

[ 12-09-2002: Message edited by: dobby ]

[ 12-09-2002: Message edited by: dobby ]</p>

[tryggvi]

[quote]Originally posted by TommyBrando:
<strong>easy, tiger. its obviously a refrence to a running joke norm macdonald used to use on the weekend update of saturday night live. get a sense of humor. <img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> </strong><hr></blockquote>

And why should Europeans have any idea what "Saturday Night Live" is?

[alfredh]

[quote]Originally posted by tryggvi:
<strong>

And why should Europeans have any idea what "Saturday Night Live" is?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Sheesh, Have you never heard of John Travolta. :D

[Clive]

[quote]Originally posted by alfredh:
<strong>Sheesh, Have you never heard of John Travolta. :D </strong><hr></blockquote>

Yeah, he's in charge of social security, right?

[der Kopf]

[quote]Originally posted by Amorph:
<strong>[...] I think the best answer to that issue is not to store your data on a speed-freak turntable in the first place. They're working on that.
</strong><hr></blockquote>

You may or may not have (I don't think you did) implied this, but your post raises an interesting question: is there even a future for rotational-hard-disk drives as the prime means of mass storage?

As computers will inevitably get faster, will harddisks be able to cope? They are already up to 15 million times slower than ram memory. How will this be in the future? Is there another form of mass storage on the horizon? Should we expect something from 'solid state' memory cards, type Flash, SD and the likes? Might they grow up to be the faster and cheaper and smaller equivalent of their fysical-error-prone rotational disk brothers?
Or is there something else entirely the boys at Big Blue are working on?

I see bubbling test-tubes reliably storing terabytes of info. But that might just be my imagination.

Anybody know more on this futur(istic) hardware question?

[Outsider]

IBM is working on MRAM or MagneticRAM. Basically a RAM that can keep its state even when no power is applied. if they can manage to make it with even today's densities, I can picture storage devices the size of hard drives with 16GB or so. But 512Mb RAM chips are made with a 250nm process still so if IBM can migrate this to a 130 or 90nm then I expect +100GB MRAM 'drives' to be feasible.

[Toadie]

[quote]Originally posted by Outsider:
<strong>IBM is working on MRAM or MagneticRAM. Basically a RAM that can keep its state even when no power is applied. if they can manage to make it with even today's densities, I can picture storage devices the size of hard drives with 16GB or so. But 512Mb RAM chips are made with a 250nm process still so if IBM can migrate this to a 130 or 90nm then I expect +100GB MRAM 'drives' to be feasible.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I knew I should have patented that idea when I had it!!!! Damned IBM...

[Matsu]

I just had a thought. Instead of spinning drives faster, why not add a second or third read/write head to each platter? iDunno how any of it would work, but a second head should make it possible for the disc to only need to spin half as much in search of a file, no? Ah well, there are probably other issues besides cost.

[Outsider]

[quote]Originally posted by Matsu:
<strong>I just had a thought. Instead of spinning drives faster, why not add a second or third read/write head to each platter? iDunno how any of it would work, but a second head should make it possible for the disc to only need to spin half as much in search of a file, no? Ah well, there are probably other issues besides cost.</strong><hr></blockquote>

I think that's how some of those 52 and 72X CDROM drives work. They have 2 or more heads reading the CD. But I think the cost of implementing this on a Hard disk drive would outweigh the advantages.

[Bigc]

[quote]Originally posted by der Kopf:
<strong>

You may or may not have (I don't think you did) implied this, but your post raises an interesting question: is there even a future for rotational-hard-disk drives as the prime means of mass storage?

As computers will inevitably get faster, will harddisks be able to cope? They are already up to 15 million times slower than ram memory. How will this be in the future? Is there another form of mass storage on the horizon? Should we expect something from 'solid state' memory cards, type Flash, SD and the likes? Might they grow up to be the faster and cheaper and smaller equivalent of their fysical-error-prone rotational disk brothers?
Or is there something else entirely the boys at Big Blue are working on?

I see bubbling test-tubes reliably storing terabytes of info. But that might just be my imagination.

Anybody know more on this futur(istic) hardware question?</strong><hr></blockquote>

Well it's interesting that IBM sold it's HD division to Hitachi, they must know something.

[dfiler]

I would prefer to see drives with increaseed performance via some other factor than spinning their platters faster. Moving parts are prone to failure and increasing the rotational speed will lead to increased bearing and head wear. Also, your dog (or company dog) will hate the 10k and 15k drives ;)

[Overhope]

[quote]Originally posted by dobby:
<strong>P.S. And for those who smoke in the presence of their computer or at leat their exposed hard disk (cover off etc). As the disk heads only sit about 15 micron from the surface of the disk, please don't smoke, a smoke molecule is about 80 micron and yes it can cause a drive crash if you blew smoke onto the drive.</strong><hr></blockquote>

Um, every last drive I've ever looked at had a stupidly hard-to-remove dust-sealed cover replete with stickers promising vast amounts of nasty stuff being visited upon you and yours should you ever ask for warrantied repairs once they're less than intact, not to mention the funny condom-like rubber shockproof cases on all these Seagates I have kicking around here. Oh, and most drives I've had to bits wouldn't actually work if you took the top cover off, since the head mechanism pivot is secured to it...

If smoke particles are getting anywhere near the platter, you've been doing something distinctly unauthorised...

[Xool]

[quote]Originally posted by Matsu:
<strong>I just had a thought. Instead of spinning drives faster, why not add a second or third read/write head to each platter? iDunno how any of it would work, but a second head should make it possible for the disc to only need to spin half as much in search of a file, no? Ah well, there are probably other issues besides cost.</strong><hr></blockquote>

At first I thought this idea was pretty useless. Current drives utilize multiple platters stacked on top of each other with a single pivoting arm of heads suffled betweeen the platters, moving in unison. These things are fairly delicate and move back n' fourth fast fast fast!

But here's the idea, stick another set of these on the opposite edge of the platter accross the spindle. Since each arm slides in from the side, perhaps they may be aligned so that they don't collide. This would reduce seek time by half on average since the platter would only need to spin half way around to hit the data versus all the way around in the worst case scenario.

(Ok, well the worst case scenario might be more than 1/2 around, but its obviously closer than all the way round! :p )

Anyhow, if you can't visualize this I'll toss together a quicky graphic. It would kind look like a record player with a second arm mounted across from the first, as if the arm was rotated around to the other side of the record.

[Matsu]

That's almost exactly what I pictured in my head.

[iNub]

I imagine it would be a real pain in the ass to syncronize two moving arms with each and every bit they read.

[Bigc]

[quote]Originally posted by Xool:
<strong>

At first I thought this idea was pretty useless. Current drives utilize multiple platters stacked on top of each other with a single pivoting arm of heads suffled betweeen the platters, moving in unison. These things are fairly delicate and move back n' fourth fast fast fast!

But here's the idea, stick another set of these on the opposite edge of the platter accross the spindle. Since each arm slides in from the side, perhaps they may be aligned so that they don't collide. This would reduce seek time by half on average since the platter would only need to spin half way around to hit the data versus all the way around in the worst case scenario.

(Ok, well the worst case scenario might be more than 1/2 around, but its obviously closer than all the way round! :p )

Anyhow, if you can't visualize this I'll toss together a quicky graphic. It would kind look like a record player with a second arm mounted across from the first, as if the arm was rotated around to the other side of the record.</strong><hr></blockquote>

isn't this essentially what RAID does, except built into one disk. How much faster is RAID (?25%?). Sounds like a good idea to me. Wonder why they haven't done it (cost?)

[HOS]

OT:

Honest question here-
[quote]Makes me laugh when I see "the biggest economy in the world" tagged onto the US, not since January 2002 it's not! <hr></blockquote>

Got a link?

It was my impression that Euro-land was not only poorer than the US, but that due to its lower productivity growth, was going to be progressively (relatively) poorer for the forseeable future. Some more on both GDP growth rates and Germany in particular:
<a href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1464893" target="_blank">http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1464893</a>
<a href="http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1477338" target="_blank">http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1477338</a>

In all honesty, I have to admit to being puzzled that an Englishman would be interested in standing up for Germans:
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2558083.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2558083.stm</a>

On topic:

RAID is great for data integrity and/or increased bandwidth, but it definitely doesn't do anything for latency. If anything, some flavors of RAID (RAID 5 in particular) can add latency.

The major reason for moving to 10k and 15k RPM drives is that seek times (a measure of latency) are inversely proportional to the rate of spin- so the faster the spin, the lower the seek time.

For the SCSI vs. IDE argument, remember that SCSI can also support command queueing, so the host controller can reorder commands on-the-fly for better performance under a heavy load.

Of course, once SerialATA comes out, we'll have to re-evaluate the whole situation, but we've got a year or so there.

Hope this helped,

-HOS