These drives felt so amazing back then. I put two in RAID0 in the first PC I ever built and it seemed mind blowingly fast. Super expensive at the time compared to other storage, but it was the best you could get on consumer grade hardware (i.e. SATA). For some reason I feel more fondly about the Raptors than I do about my first SSD (an Intel X25-M). Maybe it's just age...
An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
21–30 of 114 posts
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#22Bit of a blast from the past, I did own one of these and certainly it felt faster than anything I had used before. Am I right in saying 10k RPM is about the upper limit for spinning disks?
20,000 RPM disks were trialed but I don’t know if they ever saw production. Part of the problem is keeping the platters together at those speeds; and about that time SSDs took over.
Yeah that's what I thought, similar to CD's couldn't spin much faster without shattering iirc, rather than being a head read speed issue
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#23Bit of a blast from the past, I did own one of these and certainly it felt faster than anything I had used before. Am I right in saying 10k RPM is about the upper limit for spinning disks?
20,000 RPM disks were trialed but I don’t know if they ever saw production. Part of the problem is keeping the platters together at those speeds; and about that time SSDs took over.
20k rpm is relatively clunky F1 combustion engine territory.
I find it hard to believe spinning an electric motor and a relatively light and small disc that fast is much of a challenge to keep together, especially in such a coddled environment.
Even back in the early 90s my RC10 had a 38k rpm "modified" motor; the Motown Missile. That thing lived through hell...
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#24Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The arm has a shorter distance to travel? I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. Hard drives store data from the outside in, so you can improve latency by minimizing arm travel, and improve throughput by storing data where the linear velocity is faster. No idea how big of a differen…
That's called short-stroking - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157...
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#25Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The arm has a shorter distance to travel? I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. Hard drives store data from the outside in, so you can improve latency by minimizing arm travel, and improve throughput by storing data where the linear velocity is faster. No idea how big of a differen…
Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to get better performance out of a hard drive.
However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by short-stroking.
However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem when hard drives were still relevant.
If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long before you ran out of capacity.
For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before capacity is reached.
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#26Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The arm has a shorter distance to travel? I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. Hard drives store data from the outside in, so you can improve latency by minimizing arm travel, and improve throughput by storing data where the linear velocity is faster. No idea how big of a differen…
Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger package.
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#27Unfortunately these drives had a high failure rate which probably didn't help their popularity.
I wasn't aware of that, frankly. Do you have any sources for that? And are you talking about Raptors or Velociraptors?
I used to work in a PC shop and many of them came back. I had 2 raptors of my own and both of them failed after a few years. I know it's anecdotal but this was a niche item so if you see a lot of returns you know it's bad. This applies to mostly the raptors, we never sold any velociraptors.
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#28I used to own an ancient Sun SparcStation with a Barracuda 10k RPM disk, and the noise it made was just ... too much. It sounded like a combination of a fighter jet taking off and a dentist drilling into my skull.
Fortunately, that machine supported diskless operations, which was painfully slow, but ... that machine was painfully slow anyway (by 2005 standards), and it was part of what I liked about it.
Years later, I ran into a CAD workstation with a 10k RPM disk drive, and the noise was just ridiculous. I was so certain it had to be a fan until my coworker replaced the disk drive, I felt rather sheepish afterwards.
I sometimes miss good old HDDs, because you could tell if they were busy just by listening. But considering the godawful noise the really fast HDDs made, SSDs are a blessing.
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
20,000 RPM disks were trialed but I don’t know if they ever saw production. Part of the problem is keeping the platters together at those speeds; and about that time SSDs took over.
20k rpm is relatively clunky F1 combustion engine territory. I find it hard to believe spinning an electric motor and a relatively light and small disc that fast is much of a challenge to keep together, especially in such a coddled environment. Even back in the early 90s my RC10 had a 38k rpm "modified" motor; the Motown Missile. That thing lived through hell...
F1 engines are rebuilt after every race.
Hard drives have slightly higher longevity requirements.
Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
#30These drives felt so amazing back then. I put two in RAID0 in the first PC I ever built and it seemed mind blowingly fast. Super expensive at the time compared to other storage, but it was the best you could get on consumer grade hardware (i.e. SATA). For some reason I feel more fondly about the Raptors than I do about my first SSD (an Intel X25-M). Maybe it's just age...
I was still in college when the Raptor came out. I had an affluent friend who put two in RAID0 and I never saw Windows XP boot up so fast. He has some kind of solution rigged up for the noise so it was noticeable but pretty muffled. I was so jealous with my standard WD 7200 rpm drive.