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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

#41

Post by steve_adams_86 »

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...

I know for me there’s something innately gratifying about the hardware actually becoming faster, not just the storage functions. It’s like a faster car, or some other machine actually doing whatever it does with more power and precision.

SSDs are totally better, yeah. But it’s also kind of boring from a mechanical perspective. Insanely beefy mechanical hard drives have a certain charm that SSDs will never have.

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

#42

Post by mattowen_uk »

cricalix wrote: post #6
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?

15k RPM drives existed too. Seagate Cheetah for instance.

Not as SATA or IDE? The Cheetah is SAS/SCSI I think. I have (somewhere) a 15k RPM 143GB SCSI drive which I used in a home built Windows Server machine for a while. At the time, I had never seen Windows boot that fast. Ahhh.. simpler times.

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

#43

Post by steve_adams_86 »

avereveard wrote: post #32
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.

We got some giant disc drives in our office a while back and I hadn’t heard that sound in maybe a decade or more. It brought me back in a split second when I first heard it again, haha.

It’s incredibly nostalgic.

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

#44

Post by qball »

dehrmann wrote: post #19

Wasn'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…

>I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it.

It's actually kind of funny that "just using the beginning 25%" of the drive is completely unnecessary provided you've got your partitions set up properly- you just create a partition at the beginning of the disk that has the data you want to access the quickest, and use the end of the disk for data that you don't access coincident with the data you want to get the fastest (a perfect place to put a dual-booted Linux install, for instance).

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

#45

Post by bombcar »

qball wrote: post #44
dehrmann wrote: post #19

Wasn'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…

>I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. It's actually kind of funny that "just using the beginning 25%" of the drive is completely unnecessary provided you've got your partitions set up properly- you just create a partition at the beginning of the disk that has the data you want to access the quickest, and use the end of the disk for data th…

The problem is if you use the other 75% _at all_ in normal use it slows the 25%. A separate operating system would work well though.

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

#46

Post by bombcar »

pengaru wrote: post #23
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier 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...

Those motors don’t need to keep minuscule tracks lined up with increasingly small read/write heads. A dremel spins at 40k RPM but even though seek times are low total storage is also low.

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

#47

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

thecal wrote: post #24
dehrmann wrote: post #19

Wasn'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...

Chuckles

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

#48

Post by jaynetics »

louwrentius wrote: post #36
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.

Thinking back it seems as if the user's needs were much less central back then, and as if each component was trying to win the contest for your attention.

CD-ROM: wrrroooooo

HDD: sssrrrrrrrr clankclankclank ssssrrrr

PC-Speaker when pressing too many keys: MEEEEP

Modem: booooob, boop beep boop beep boop boop bli blu bri bru brrriiiiii BWANG BWANG BWANG KCHHHHHHHHH

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

#49

Post by crypt0x »

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...

Came here to make exactly this post. Thank you.

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

#50

Post by camhenlin »

Trigg3r wrote: post #22
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier 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.

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

Yes I had a 52x drive in the early 00s shatter a cheap writable CD (I think rated at 24x or something along those lines) and I was picking bits out of the drive to get it working again. But then again, a CD is an insanely cheap piece of plastic, so how fast should we expect it to reliably spin at?
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