Western Digital working on 20,000rpm Raptor

[Jay]

Rumour control: Western Digital working on 20,000rpm Raptor | News | Custom PC

Even though many SCSI hard drives for servers have a super-fast spin speed of 15,000rpm, the humble desktop hard drive has been stuck at 7,200rpm for over a decade now. The only exception is Western Digital’s 10,000rpm S-ATA Raptor drives, but WD clearly thinks there may be a lot more mileage in this approach, as it’s apparently working on a super-fast 20,000rpm Raptor.

Just think of the noise and heat! I work with 15K SAS drives and they are so noisy!

[Andy3536]

I find it very hard to belive with SSDs on the horizon, and SSDs will plumit in price after they've been out a while too meaning any new 20,000 rpm raptor will be beaten on performance and price.

[Kilmatead]

I find it very hard to belive with SSDs on the horizon

Don't SSD's still have dodgy lifetime R/W issues (don't we all)?

[aidanjt]

I find it very hard to belive with SSDs on the horizon, and SSDs will plumit in price after they've been out a while too meaning any new 20,000 rpm raptor will be beaten on performance and price.

SSDs wont saturate a SATA2 link anytime soon, a 20,000rpm raptor will get closer to doing that, and wont die after a million or so I/Os. I'm not too concerned about the heat and noise issue, apparently the velociraptor is very quiet and cool, and if the new one follows the same design principles, it shouldn't be too bad.

That's assuming this news is reliable of course.

[UseItNow]

Think of the price.

[aidanjt]

SAS drives are even more expensive, companies still use them for high volume storage.

[Jay]

I have a few servers running 4 x 146gb 15K SAS drives in RAID 5, they are seriously fast.

[aidanjt]

20k raptors might make for an attractive alternative though, no?

[FifthFreedom]

Depends of the size.

Do we reckon the new "Tyrannosaurus" drive will have a larger capacity then the Velociraptor or a small one?

If it's less then 300Gig then I doubt it will be a sucesses in the Gaming PC market because who has the money to buy two £300 drives? My guess very few people....

[Jay]

I doubt that 20000rpm Raptor would be a good alternative for 15K SAS drives in business to be honest.

[aidanjt]

Depends of the size.

Do we reckon the new "Tyrannosaurus" drive will have a larger capacity then the Velociraptor or a small one?

If it's less then 300Gig then I doubt it will be a sucesses in the Gaming PC market because who has the money to buy two £300 drives? My guess very few people....

It's likely the capacity will equal or double the current velociraptor.

[aidanjt]

I doubt that 20000rpm Raptor would be a good alternative for 15K SAS drives in business to be honest.

It depends on the workload really. SAS may support TCQ over SATA, but with that kind of brute throughput I doubt either ?CQ feature will make much of a difference to performance.
Circuitry automagic features can only do so much for performance.

[Jay]

its more to do with the fact that sas drives will probably have a longer expected life under intense load. Also I don't know any SATA contollers with battery-backed write cache. There probably will be some butI can't think of any at the moment.

[aidanjt]

its more to do with the fact that sas drives will probably have a longer expected life under intense load.

Compared to an ordinary SATA disk, that's definitely the case, raptors are a different breed though, and WD boasts high MBF figures and a long warranty period to boot, out of all the SATA disks they're definitely the most dependable.

Also I don't know any SATA contollers with battery-backed write cache. There probably will be some butI can't think of any at the moment.

Yeah, I've seen a few high-end controllers, pricey of course, but probably less than the equivalent SAS controller.

I think a lot of it boils down to old schools of thought as well. When ATA came about it was awful, the margin of performance, reliability, and maturity between ATA and SCSI was huge, bigger than the Atlantic big. These days the difference between SATA and SAS have slimmed a great deal. Of course there'll still be massive volume workloads that SAS can tackle more efficiently. So it depends on what your storage subsystem will do, as to which is the better solution for any given problem.

[s3ds]

can the raptor do full duplex ?

[Jay]

It cant be because SATA isn't full duplex its only hald duplex.

at the end of the day SAS is miles ahead of SATA

SAS drives have better / lower latency, lower command overheads, generally have faster access times, have much deeper command queue depths and can be configured as dual-ported solutions which enables a further doubling of data rates. Also as they come in both 3.5" and 2.5" so you can normally get 4 into a 1U rackmount.

SATA just will not cut it for high access database servers or large user terminal service servers.

The only issue is that they cost between £1.30 to £2.70 per MB and thats not cheap but when you think that are last 2 x Intel Quad X3210, 4gb RAM etc came to £5,000 the cost of the drives are not that big of a deal.

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