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An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

louwrentius.com

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Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#31

Post by myrandomcomment »

donw wrote: post #29
pengaru wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is 100% not true. The engines are sealed by the FIA and replacing parts of the engine incurs gird penalties. You have a limit of 4 engines a year you can swap without a penalty. In the last 2 races both Lewis and Valtteri took penalties for swapping out the ICE part of the system. When Max had the crash at Silverstone with Lewis, RedBull was not 100% sure of the state of the engine as they are not allowed to disassemble it. They had to use fiber optic cameras to look inside. Even then they got it wrong and Max took a new engine in Turkey.

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#32

Post by avereveard »

kayson wrote: post #21

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...

same, I had these for a decade, and it was great. a little noisy, but I miss the trattatatatata of them seeking.

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#35

Post by TacticalCoder »

krylon wrote: post #28

I 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 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.

Oh indeed!

I used to run my HDDs in soundproofed enclosures (a company was selling those back in the days) but of course it would make them overheat. So I'd cut a square hole in the HDD enclosure (and through the soundproofing foam inside the enclosure) and then I'd put a large but quiet fan on top of the HDD. This worked great, for years.

Having owned silent computers like the Commodore C64 / C128 and Amiga the switch to the early ultra noisy PC was particularly painful to me. So back when "silent PCs" weren't a thing I made my own: I'd run fans at 7 V instead of 12 (by using the 12 V and 5 V pins to create 7 V), I had my neighbor (electrical engineer) create me a device I'd put into all my PSUs that'd turn the PSU's fan off when the heat wasn't too high (back then this didn't exist: but I wanted one anyway so I had my neighbor "invent" one and I'd then replicate it in all my PSUs) and... When I found these HDD "quietening" enclosures, I ordered so many the company asked me if I wanted to become the official importer for the Benelux area : )

I'd have super quiet "panaflo" fans shipped to me from Japan and I'd replace all my PSU / CPU / tower fans with these quiet fans.

So basically I had quiet PCs before it was a thing.

Nowadays I just buy Be Quiet! PSUs / fans and a well insulated tower and I'm a happy camper. Things got way quieter : )

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#36

Post by louwrentius »

krylon wrote: post #28

I 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,…

Younger generations have absolutely no idea how much noise a computer of that era made, even if it didn't have a 10,000 RPM drive. And most people accepted it.

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#37

Post by myrandomcomment »

cerved wrote: post #11
Trigg3r wrote: post #2

Bit 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?

No. There's a tradeoff. Faster drives means more power, more heat, more vibrations, more noise, less durability. Spinning disk is mainly about price per byte at good performance - there's simply no market.

100%. This is why when I ordered my home NAS I pick 5400RPM NAS drives (FreeNAS Mini). The WD Red drives in my current system have been spinning since 2014, 4x4TB in a mirrored stripped set for a whopping 8TB of space + 2x120GB Evo write caches (mirrored).

The key to speed is having lots of drives, RAM and SSD write cache.

I plan on getting the new TrueNAS Mini XL this year with 8x14TB.

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#38

Post by louwrentius »

RedShift1 wrote: post #27
louwrentius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ok, fair enough, thanks for sharing.

Re: An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor

#40

Post by pengaru »

donw wrote: post #29
pengaru wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> F1 engines are rebuilt after every race.

Even if what you said were true, so what?

We're talking about a tiny spinning disc on a brushless hub motor. There's basically a single moving part, maybe a few more if riding on ball bearings.

Do you have any understanding of what is going on inside a many-cylinder internal combustion piston engine spinning at 20k rpm? We can view the flywheel as the hard disk platter equivalent, the real madness is at the reciprocating mass being flung back and forth at the same rate.

Edit: Here's another useful reference point to help put RPM numbers into perspective: a turbocharger's rotating assembly spins on the order of 200-300k RPM without flying apart. A minute is a pretty long time.

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