An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by a-dub » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 7:11 PM UTC

a-dub wrote: post #98

et2o wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing find. Just curious-why would anyone buy this today? For retro-computing/nostalgia??

if i recall a few years later, i had an hp9000 at work that had an array of them. it wouldn't surprise me one bit if there were still hp9000s, as/400s or other similar datacenter class unix(ish) server hardware out there that is still in production where replacing a failed disk with the exact same model, even if refurbed, is the safest option for solving the problem with old hardware that can be difficult to replace…

as another point of trivia, i'll add that it was easy to find because of the memorable seagate model number scheme.

ST12550N

ST - seagate technologies

1 - 3.5" full height

2550 - unformatted capacity

N - fast scsi

if i recall, this scheme went all the way back to the early 80s.

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

#112

Post by jquery » Sun, Oct 31, 2021, 7:42 PM UTC

pengaru wrote: post #75

jquery wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're underselling what HDDs do. The seeks they have to do are so precision, if you made the hard drive the size of the earth, the "head" would still only be a couple meters from the ground and it would have to go any square meter on the entire earth in 1/100 of a second. It's absolutely incredible that the tiny SATA bay in my computer holds an 18TB drive. That's 18 * 8 trillion bits of data, or if the hard drive ha…

You're ignoring the statement I'm actually responding to: "Part of the problem is keeping the platters together at those speeds" I'm not speaking to seeking or precision at all, only pointing out there's not really any challenge in keeping the platters together at these speeds.

okay, i guess in my mind I automatically translate “coming apart at those speeds” to “the microstructure stretches to a degree it’s impossible to read/write to the drives”. Nothing catastrophic.

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

#113

Post by KingMachiavelli » Mon, Nov 01, 2021, 5:01 AM UTC

Man I'm pretty young relative to most of the big advancements in computing but the HDD to SSD transition is very memorable. Defragging the HDD was probably one of the first computer maintenance things I learned. Upgrading my laptop to a SSD was one of the first upgrades I did.

Meanwhile I still find laptops from the ~2015 era that for some reason shipped with a HDD. I remember the Macbook Air being one of the first computers to make a SSD standard while the rest of the laptop/'netbook' was for some reason surprised that it was so much faster. :/

I still love hard drives for bulk storage but I will never use a HDD based machine... especially not if it is running Windows >=8. If only EC2/cloud providers would make IOPs cheaper - for some reason they seem to be crazy expensive compared to what a $50 SSD can give.

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

#114

Post by Fnoord » Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

dekhn wrote: post #109

bestham wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “white box” server not built by a typical server manufacturer. It could be a no-name part or a consumer PC acting as a server. Google were known for not buying traditional servers from Company, Dell and the like.

google bought servers from dell, and from rackspace or some other vendor. I helped run a fleet of dells with 15K SCSI drives for google (mysql workload) that was absolutely critical and it took the company a decade to replace the dell machines with "white box" (really, self-designed and externally manufactured) servers.

What Google did different than the rest back in the days was mostly relying on x86-32 with Linux and not so much RISC (SPARC) with Solaris. Sun's market share was huge back in those days.