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

louwrentius.com

61–70 of 114 posts

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

#61
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of WD 5400RPM drives are actually 7200RPM unfortunately.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital-is-t...

Basically, WD decided if was cheaper to just make 7200 drives and sell some mislabeled as a '5400 class' drive.

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

#62
post #51

not much around that's as satisfying sounding as starting up a big full-size ATX case crammed with raptors. starting up a big lathe or mill spindle, or maybe a large phase converter with a heavy lever switch come close, but they don't scratch that "i'm in a super computer lab" itch as much as the fantastic whir of a raptor RAID. utilitarian feature : you could hear a bad sector from anywhere in a large room.

I used to work for HGST (now absorbed into WD) in the EMEA Enterprise Support lab. My main role was setting up PoC/testing systems, and support for high capacity SAS/helium drives, although I mostly worked with high-capacity flash boards and arrays. The 15K rpm drives could sometimes be quite noisy; especially with 48 or more in an array. Three of the engineers with whom I worked specialised in disk failure analysis;…

I have 300GB wd velociraptors for many years in one of my machines... going back 10 years, only got replaced last year... probably didn't need to be replaced, one drive out of a raid 0 array died, the other probably still works...

but on the note of hearing differences in sounds, back in the day of dial up, since my ISP gave unlimited free dial up minutes, but it had to last no more than 2 hours (it would auto kick you off if you were on for more than 2) my modem would dial every 2 hours... And it got to a stage that I could know, by sound, if it was going to get a 56k link or a 33.6k link...

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work for HGST (now absorbed into WD) in the EMEA Enterprise Support lab. My main role was setting up PoC/testing systems, and support for high capacity SAS/helium drives, although I mostly worked with high-capacity flash boards and arrays. The 15K rpm drives could sometimes be quite noisy; especially with 48 or more in an array. Three of the engineers with whom I worked specialised in disk failure analysis;…

I have 300GB wd velociraptors for many years in one of my machines... going back 10 years, only got replaced last year... probably didn't need to be replaced, one drive out of a raid 0 array died, the other probably still works... but on the note of hearing differences in sounds, back in the day of dial up, since my ISP gave unlimited free dial up minutes, but it had to last no more than 2 hours (it would auto kick y…

I can totally relate, I could also tell the link speed by the noises.

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

#64
I still have my eight Velociraptors I used in a RAID5 (7 used, one backup) back in the day. It's in a box in my garage. I've meant to toss them out, because I know I will never used them, but it's just such a hard thing to bring myself to do. I mean, they're such powerful and capable drives, but like the article mentions, they're obsoleted by even cheap SSDs.

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

#66
Around that time (2004 or 2005), thanks to a giveaway from a work client who'd downsized, I got a PC with a SCSI card and two 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drives. (No idea what type... all I remember is the RPM.) I'd previously been using my ex-work PC from 2001, so this was a nice upgrade. More MBs, more GHz, bigger HD.

First port of call was a chkdsk, of course - and one of the drives had some bad sectors. It happens. I threw it in the bin, and reinstalled Windows on the other one, which was fine. Mmm... it was so fast! That's what you get from those extra GHz and MBs, of course. 4 years is a long time in computer performance terms.

After about a year of very enjoyable super fast PC use, the hard drive died. I replaced it with some generic UDMA IDE thing - and discovered almost immediately how much the 10,000 RPM SCSI drive had been bringing to the table :/

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

#67
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.

This sentiment also maps onto BEV and ICE for me. I love the utility, performance and efficiency of newer tech, but mechanical machines are far more awe inspiring to me. They're more organic somehow, even though that's the definition of an oxymoron. Haha.

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

#69
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, I'm building a computer with lots of storage, you sound like someone who knows what they're doing... maybe you could help me... currently the plan is: 3x Firecuda 4tb NVME 2x QVO 8tb SATA SSD 4x WD Ultrastar 18tb. My use case is I need tons of storage that operates fast and is used for all sorts of things (creative work, gaming, archiving, job processing), sometimes all at the same time. It's a threadripper pro…

Depends on what OS you are running. In my case I am using TrueNAS so it is made for being a NAS and you can just tell it, hey here is a cache, here is a log drive, etc.

If you are talking about local storage for a workstation then I am not sure. Depends on your workflow. If you have a "work on this on the fast stuff, then when I am done I can move it to the spinning rust" then you might want to figure out largest project size for fast vs long term storage of the projects.

Sorry if this is not helpful.

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

#70
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

Being pedantic, the modern engines that you're talking about don't run at 20,000 RPM either, they are limited to 15,000 RPM and I believe they basically never actually reach that limit, usually topping out at 12,000-13,000 instead. When the engines did run closer to 20,000 they were indeed rebuilt much more often. I am not well versed in F1 regulation history but Wikipedia claims that before 2005 engines were not req…

In the turbo-hybrid era the rules are as I have outlined, you cannot rebuild between races. The current engine is a V6 @ 15000RPM.

https://jalopnik.com/how-formula-ones-amazing-new-hybrid-tur...

In the past the rules were different.

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