51–60 of 114 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 equiv…
This precision structure has to be maintained at 10k RPM. Can it be maintained at 20k RPM? Maybe not so easily. Let's not undersell the technology.
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.
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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...
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/o4k0xa/up_to_2...
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.
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; one of their tools was an inductive telephone earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small amplified speaker. These guys would put the pickup on top of a drive and listen to all the electronics, spindle motor and head-moving voice coil electromagnetic noise as the drive spun up. This process would generally be followed by comments such as: "Hmm, head 4 sounds iffy", "This unit's on older firmware" and "Sounds like the heads aren't coming off the ramp"...
A lost/fading talent now that 2 out of 3 are retired". It was quite amazing to watch and listen to these guys at work.
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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.
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 workstation pc, so I have spare PCIE slots to upgrade later.
I'm thinking of replacing a couple of the QVO SSDs with Ultrastars and using a couple of the FireCudas as cache drives for the platter drives. Good idea or bad idea? Would I be making a meaningful tradeoff or should I just go for the extra space?
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;…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 dis…
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 required to last for two race weekends[1], meaning you could rebuild the engine between each race weekend if you wanted to. At that time there was no RPM limit[2] for the engines and the iconic Ferrari F2004 supposedly maxed out at 19,000 RPM[3].
So maybe the comment you are replying to is referring to pre-2005 F1 engines :) I have no idea myself if a modern F1 engine could run at 20,000 and still be as durable as the current engines or if running at such high RPM inherently means bad durability.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Formula_One_World_Champio...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_engines#Engine_spe...
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...
Like, yeah, I get it. There‘s quite a few sounds that trigger emotional reactions in me.
The whirring and buzzing of the PSU. The Award BIOS beep. The seeking sound of an empty 3.5 inch disk drive. The slight CRT zang between different resolutions - and the electrical drizzle of degaussing such a beast.
But to this day nothing amazes me more than opening a MacBook and it being dead silent.
Maybe it‘s because I have young kids, maybe it‘s because I used to be an audio recording hobbyist (and isolating computer sound was always a pain).
But there‘s nothing I enjoy more than the powerful sound of silence.