Faster rpm IDE drive

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
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 ?
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 26
    murbotmurbot Posts: 5,262member
    They would make the MDD Power Macs a little too loud, IMO.
  • Reply 2 of 26
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    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>
  • Reply 3 of 26
    xypexype Posts: 672member
    [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.
  • Reply 4 of 26
    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]" />
  • Reply 5 of 26
    amorphamorph Posts: 7,112member
    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.
  • Reply 6 of 26
    Damn germans <img src="graemlins/bugeye.gif" border="0" alt="[Skeptical]" />
  • Reply 7 of 26
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    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.
  • Reply 8 of 26
    cliveclive Posts: 720member
    [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!
  • Reply 9 of 26
    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]" />
  • Reply 10 of 26
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    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>
  • Reply 11 of 26
    [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?
  • Reply 12 of 26
    [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.
  • Reply 13 of 26
    cliveclive Posts: 720member
    [quote]Originally posted by alfredh:

    <strong>Sheesh, Have you never heard of John Travolta. </strong><hr></blockquote>



    Yeah, he's in charge of social security, right?
  • Reply 14 of 26
    der kopfder kopf Posts: 2,275member
    [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?
  • Reply 15 of 26
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    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.
  • Reply 16 of 26
    [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...
  • Reply 17 of 26
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    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.
  • Reply 18 of 26
    outsideroutsider Posts: 6,008member
    [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.
  • Reply 19 of 26
    bigcbigc Posts: 1,224member
    [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.
  • Reply 20 of 26
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    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
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