14 ms·

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

121 points by louwrentius 5y ago

serf 5y ago
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.
- linker3000 5y ago
  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; 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.
  - xattt 5y ago
    I believe this sort of acoustic analysis for failure is still used in wind turbines.
  - tiernano 5y ago
    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...
    - xvf22 5y ago
      I can totally relate, I could also tell the link speed by the noises.
    - fibonachos 5y ago
      Wow, this brought back some great memories :)
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    one of their tools was an inductive telephone earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small amplified speaker. Ah, yes, the Mark I Real-Time Fourier Analyzer.
- ggreer 5y ago
  The motors in a Tesla can go up to 18,000rpm (20,000rpm in the carbon-wrapped Plaid motors). They sound pretty cool when you floor it.[1] Though once you pick up speed all you can hear is wind noise. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rg75JbVOpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rg75JbVOpg
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    That one has a bad bearing, as noted in the description. Normally they don't whir nearly as much...
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    For vehicle motors, I think you should look to the Siemens Taurus locomotive. Though half an hour of clips is a bit excessive. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-IC-JRJYwc&vl=en https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-IC-JRJYwc&vl=en
ccakes 5y ago
I had a WD740 back in the day, remember them costing a small fortune compared to 7200rpm disks but it felt worth it!
CrazyCatDog 5y ago
I tried to order a v-raptor around 2009, IT wouldn’t have it, “they burn out at 30% off the useful line of a standard speed drive.” Still wish I had pushed back!
allenrb 5y ago
I had one of these, same model as the author and around the same time. Was running some sort of desktop Linux, maybe Fedora? Either way, latency really is the key. It’s hard to grasp just how much quicker even a cheap SSD is for random I/O today.
p1mrx 5y ago
The edge of a 3.5 inch platter spinning at 10000 rpm moves at 3.5*pi*10000 inches/minute, which is 47 m/s or 104 MPH. I'm a bit surprised that it's slower than a car.
aaron695 5y ago
Remember short stroking - Modding A Seagate Barracuda Into A VelociRaptor - http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/ http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/ (2009)
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Is there any reason to mess with the drive settings instead of just making a smaller partition?
peterangular 5y ago
Wow. Nostalgia... They were insanely reliable/performant drives and after reading enough reviews I couldn't resist back in the day. Regarding benchmarks, they definitely had a bit more pep by the numbers. My two 10k WD RPM's ended up in a redundant RAID in my Sun W2100z. They ran over a decade with 24/7 use as a Debian/Ubuntu OS LVM.
Trigg3r 5y ago
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?
- RedShift1 5y ago
  Servers used to have 15k RPM drives but that segment has diminished in favor of SSDs.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  There are also 15,000 RPM drives but they were exclusive to the server market. They were small and extremely loud. Their IOPs and latency was even better. Funny: https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-hard-drive-rip-15k-hdds/ https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-...
  - cerved 5y ago
    "In summary, 15K RPM hard drives are less dense, use more power and have performance somewhere between 1/4th and 1/300th of a SSD."
- cricalix 5y ago
  15k RPM drives existed too. Seagate Cheetah for instance.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    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.
- cerved 5y ago
  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.
RedShift1 5y ago
Unfortunately these drives had a high failure rate which probably didn't help their popularity.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  I wasn't aware of that, frankly. Do you have any sources for that? And are you talking about Raptors or Velociraptors?
  - RedShift1 5y ago
    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.
    - louwrentius 5y ago
      Ok, fair enough, thanks for sharing.
- cricalix 5y ago
  I can't remember if they failed as badly as the IBM Deathstar.. sorry, Deskstar (https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326292-why-lying-about-storage-products-is-bad-an-ibm-deskstar-story https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326292-why-lying-about...). Those things were notorious for failing.
Zenst 5y ago
Lovely drives - built a system with 3 of them - 2x74Gb one for OS and another for core programs and a 32GB one dedicated to swap/TEMP. Got well over a decade solid use out of those and only just retired the last of those drives last month. They did do a later generation that could do 15k RPM but by then SSD's were starting to become trusted and more palatable price wise, though I dare an SSD of that ere to work near on 24/7 for ten years solid abuse.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  I don't think that the (Veloci)raptor ever reached 15,000 RPM. Such drives do exist but as far as I know, they always were exclusive to the server market.
progman32 5y ago
I still have my Raptor X, the one with the clear window in the top cover. Used it until 2017 or so because the enjoyment I got seeing the head whiz around was far greater than marginally faster loading on an SSD! I'm sure I'll use the drive again on a retro project eventually.
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  Now I want to build a rig with a bunch of HDD's screwed to a clear side panel and mod each drive with clear covers. It would be mesmerizing to watch all the heads fly.
mechanical_bear 5y ago
Ah, takes me back to my first enthusiast build, an overclocked Pentium D 830, 1gb ram, and two of these drives in Raid 0. It felt pretty wild for the time.
dehrmann 5y ago
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 difference this would make.
- thecal 5y ago
  That's called short-stroking - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157...
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    Chuckles
- louwrentius 5y ago
  Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to get better performance out of a hard drive. However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by short-stroking. However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem when hard drives were still relevant. If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long before you ran out of capacity. For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before capacity is reached.
- p_l 5y ago
  Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger package.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Specifically for the velociraptor drives however, it was a 2.5" form factor drive that needed to be mounted in a 3.5" form factor heatsink, so you weren't gaining anything in drive density.
kayson 5y ago
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...
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  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.
  - lttlrck 5y ago
    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.
    - mikepurvis 5y ago
      Years ago I participated in a few adult LEGO robotics competitions with a group in Toronto, and one of the peculiarities about the Mindstorms kit was that each RCX (the control module) had just three motor outputs and three sensor inputs. So you could do a bit of hackery like doubling up your sensors, and obviously in the extreme case you could go multi-RCX and have them talk to each other over infrared. But that constraint always really pushed people toward finding pure mechanical solutions to problems that in the real world would just be solved by slapping on another servo. One of my favourite examples was a single-motor steered castor, where a ratcheting mechanism switched between wheel driving and castor rotation based on which way you ran the motor. I think another factor with it is just that LEGO makes the pursuit of a mechanism-type solution inexpensive, effortless, and fun, whereas in "real" industrial automation, every new gear or bearing is another point of failure, one more thing requiring lubrication check-ups and so on.
krylon 5y ago
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 ran into a CAD workstation with a 10k RPM disk drive, and the noise was just ridiculous. I was so certain it had to be a fan until my coworker replaced the disk drive, I felt rather sheepish afterwards. 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.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  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.
  - jaynetics 5y ago
    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
    - alphabettsy 5y ago
      Yea. They sounded much more like machinery than the mostly solid state wonders we have today.
  - MrYellowP 5y ago
    I loved when my 386, with two harddrives, turned on. It sounded like a turbine was ramping up! :D
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
r0s 5y ago
I have one of these on my shelf, kept as a memento after switching to SSDs. All my other old HDDs are still here in spirit, stripped of their powerful magnets now decorating my fridge.
DigitallyFidget 5y ago
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.
olgeni 5y ago
I got 2 - try the smartctl short test on them if you have one available, then record it and send it to your friends :D
tom_ 5y ago
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 :/
a-dub 5y ago
in the mid 90s, i once found a 2gb barracuda (1st gen 7200rpm 3.5" double height hard disk) in the ez-ad. there wasn't much market for huge server type drives where i lived, and the owner was interested in a trade of some random bike parts and a cd-rom drive (a screaming deal, but honestly he just wanted to get rid of it). it would heat the whole case it was mounted in and make enough noise to be heard rooms away... but it was fast! and two gigabytes was enough for not just one but mulitple linux partitions alongside windows and os/2. i remember a friend's father losing his shit when i told him i had such a large disk. because it was built for the datacenter, i had to use an external desk fan to cool it. it was simultaneously completely impractical and totally awesome. ed: there's the beast. shocked you can still buy it! forgot it was scsi (which also made it even faster because the good adaptec scsi adapters of the day offloaded i/o interrupts from the main cpu)! https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8673a36ab2e165570a25b4b607f6b82&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=00-PB-PLA-BASE&utm_term=4575136603990180&utm_content=PB-PLA-ADG-BASE https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8...
- et2o 5y ago
  Amazing find. Just curious-why would anyone buy this today? For retro-computing/nostalgia??
  - smashed 5y ago
    And who would on to such stock?? Surely these are not still manufactured??
  - a-dub 5y ago
    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 running software that isn't backed up that no one even understands, yet is critical to some large business.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_yoqn 5y ago
I put a velociraptor in my first PC build back in 2009. I thought the small form factor mounted on a 3.5" heat sink was really neat.
gfody 5y ago
~2004 I whiteboxed a db server with 48 raptors (WD800GD) via 3 16-port sata raid controllers (areca ARC-1160 w/1gb dram and bbu modules), I striped all 16 in 3 raid0s and put them in a soft raid4 for ~2.5tb of speedy local attached storage. the datacenter guys thought I was nuts for using consumer stuff in a server but at the time sas prices were out of my reach and I was willing to take the risk. the server performed great and I eventually made 2 more of them before we were acquired and the pros took over - what's funny is the pros only used dell servers and ended up having to go with some outrageously expensive top-end models to get the iops that my whiteboxes were delivering. 144 raptors in production for 3 years under heavy load and we never lost a single drive. we had the servers sent back to us when they were decommissioned and most of the raptors ended up in peoples' workstations for another couple years and I never heard that any of those drives ever failed. legendary HDD
- mrtweetyhack 5y ago
  I never heard my old cars stopped running so they must be running
- louwrentius 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this!
- 0xFF0123 5y ago
  What does whitebox mean in this context?
  - bestham 5y ago
    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.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      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.
oliwarner 5y ago
I miss the boot experience of my RAID0 Raptors. You could feel the machine turning on from across the room. I'd upgraded from ~5400 too, so it really was something special.
0xfeeddeadbeef 5y ago
I'm still using 500GB VelociRaptor (WDC WD5000HHTZ, made in 2012) as my "work drive". It's noisy, but fast enough.
KingMachiavelli 5y ago
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.

121 points by louwrentius 5y ago

serf 5y ago

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.

linker3000 5y ago
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; 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.
- xattt 5y ago
  I believe this sort of acoustic analysis for failure is still used in wind turbines.
- tiernano 5y ago
  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...
  - xvf22 5y ago
    I can totally relate, I could also tell the link speed by the noises.
  - fibonachos 5y ago
    Wow, this brought back some great memories :)
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  one of their tools was an inductive telephone earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small amplified speaker. Ah, yes, the Mark I Real-Time Fourier Analyzer.
ggreer 5y ago
The motors in a Tesla can go up to 18,000rpm (20,000rpm in the carbon-wrapped Plaid motors). They sound pretty cool when you floor it.[1] Though once you pick up speed all you can hear is wind noise. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rg75JbVOpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rg75JbVOpg
- HPsquared 5y ago
  That one has a bad bearing, as noted in the description. Normally they don't whir nearly as much...
- Symbiote 5y ago
  For vehicle motors, I think you should look to the Siemens Taurus locomotive. Though half an hour of clips is a bit excessive. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-IC-JRJYwc&vl=en https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=J-IC-JRJYwc&vl=en

ccakes 5y ago

I had a WD740 back in the day, remember them costing a small fortune compared to 7200rpm disks but it felt worth it!

CrazyCatDog 5y ago

I tried to order a v-raptor around 2009, IT wouldn’t have it, “they burn out at 30% off the useful line of a standard speed drive.” Still wish I had pushed back!

allenrb 5y ago

I had one of these, same model as the author and around the same time. Was running some sort of desktop Linux, maybe Fedora? Either way, latency really is the key. It’s hard to grasp just how much quicker even a cheap SSD is for random I/O today.

p1mrx 5y ago

The edge of a 3.5 inch platter spinning at 10000 rpm moves at 3.5*pi*10000 inches/minute, which is 47 m/s or 104 MPH. I'm a bit surprised that it's slower than a car.

aaron695 5y ago

Remember short stroking - Modding A Seagate Barracuda Into A VelociRaptor - http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/ http://www.techwarelabs.com/seagate_1-5tb-mod/ (2009)

Dylan16807 5y ago
Is there any reason to mess with the drive settings instead of just making a smaller partition?

peterangular 5y ago

Wow. Nostalgia... They were insanely reliable/performant drives and after reading enough reviews I couldn't resist back in the day. Regarding benchmarks, they definitely had a bit more pep by the numbers. My two 10k WD RPM's ended up in a redundant RAID in my Sun W2100z. They ran over a decade with 24/7 use as a Debian/Ubuntu OS LVM.

Trigg3r 5y ago

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?

RedShift1 5y ago
Servers used to have 15k RPM drives but that segment has diminished in favor of SSDs.
louwrentius 5y ago
There are also 15,000 RPM drives but they were exclusive to the server market. They were small and extremely loud. Their IOPs and latency was even better. Funny: https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-hard-drive-rip-15k-hdds/ https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-...
- cerved 5y ago
  "In summary, 15K RPM hard drives are less dense, use more power and have performance somewhere between 1/4th and 1/300th of a SSD."
cricalix 5y ago
15k RPM drives existed too. Seagate Cheetah for instance.
- mattowen_uk 5y ago
  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.
cerved 5y ago
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.

RedShift1 5y ago

Unfortunately these drives had a high failure rate which probably didn't help their popularity.

louwrentius 5y ago
I wasn't aware of that, frankly. Do you have any sources for that? And are you talking about Raptors or Velociraptors?
- RedShift1 5y ago
  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.
  - louwrentius 5y ago
    Ok, fair enough, thanks for sharing.
cricalix 5y ago
I can't remember if they failed as badly as the IBM Deathstar.. sorry, Deskstar (https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326292-why-lying-about-storage-products-is-bad-an-ibm-deskstar-story https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326292-why-lying-about...). Those things were notorious for failing.

Zenst 5y ago

Lovely drives - built a system with 3 of them - 2x74Gb one for OS and another for core programs and a 32GB one dedicated to swap/TEMP. Got well over a decade solid use out of those and only just retired the last of those drives last month. They did do a later generation that could do 15k RPM but by then SSD's were starting to become trusted and more palatable price wise, though I dare an SSD of that ere to work near on 24/7 for ten years solid abuse.

louwrentius 5y ago
I don't think that the (Veloci)raptor ever reached 15,000 RPM. Such drives do exist but as far as I know, they always were exclusive to the server market.

progman32 5y ago

I still have my Raptor X, the one with the clear window in the top cover. Used it until 2017 or so because the enjoyment I got seeing the head whiz around was far greater than marginally faster loading on an SSD! I'm sure I'll use the drive again on a retro project eventually.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
Now I want to build a rig with a bunch of HDD's screwed to a clear side panel and mod each drive with clear covers. It would be mesmerizing to watch all the heads fly.

mechanical_bear 5y ago

Ah, takes me back to my first enthusiast build, an overclocked Pentium D 830, 1gb ram, and two of these drives in Raid 0. It felt pretty wild for the time.

dehrmann 5y ago

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 difference this would make.

thecal 5y ago
That's called short-stroking - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157...
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Chuckles
louwrentius 5y ago
Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to get better performance out of a hard drive. However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by short-stroking. However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem when hard drives were still relevant. If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long before you ran out of capacity. For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before capacity is reached.
p_l 5y ago
Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger package.
- Macha 5y ago
  Specifically for the velociraptor drives however, it was a 2.5" form factor drive that needed to be mounted in a 3.5" form factor heatsink, so you weren't gaining anything in drive density.

kayson 5y ago

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...

steve_adams_86 5y ago
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.
- lttlrck 5y ago
  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.
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Years ago I participated in a few adult LEGO robotics competitions with a group in Toronto, and one of the peculiarities about the Mindstorms kit was that each RCX (the control module) had just three motor outputs and three sensor inputs. So you could do a bit of hackery like doubling up your sensors, and obviously in the extreme case you could go multi-RCX and have them talk to each other over infrared. But that constraint always really pushed people toward finding pure mechanical solutions to problems that in the real world would just be solved by slapping on another servo. One of my favourite examples was a single-motor steered castor, where a ratcheting mechanism switched between wheel driving and castor rotation based on which way you ran the motor. I think another factor with it is just that LEGO makes the pursuit of a mechanism-type solution inexpensive, effortless, and fun, whereas in "real" industrial automation, every new gear or bearing is another point of failure, one more thing requiring lubrication check-ups and so on.

krylon 5y ago

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 ran into a CAD workstation with a 10k RPM disk drive, and the noise was just ridiculous. I was so certain it had to be a fan until my coworker replaced the disk drive, I felt rather sheepish afterwards. 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.

louwrentius 5y ago
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.
- jaynetics 5y ago
  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
  - alphabettsy 5y ago
    Yea. They sounded much more like machinery than the mostly solid state wonders we have today.
- MrYellowP 5y ago
  I loved when my 386, with two harddrives, turned on. It sounded like a turbine was ramping up! :D
TacticalCoder 5y ago

r0s 5y ago

I have one of these on my shelf, kept as a memento after switching to SSDs. All my other old HDDs are still here in spirit, stripped of their powerful magnets now decorating my fridge.

DigitallyFidget 5y ago

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.

olgeni 5y ago

I got 2 - try the smartctl short test on them if you have one available, then record it and send it to your friends :D

tom_ 5y ago

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 :/

a-dub 5y ago

in the mid 90s, i once found a 2gb barracuda (1st gen 7200rpm 3.5" double height hard disk) in the ez-ad. there wasn't much market for huge server type drives where i lived, and the owner was interested in a trade of some random bike parts and a cd-rom drive (a screaming deal, but honestly he just wanted to get rid of it). it would heat the whole case it was mounted in and make enough noise to be heard rooms away... but it was fast! and two gigabytes was enough for not just one but mulitple linux partitions alongside windows and os/2. i remember a friend's father losing his shit when i told him i had such a large disk. because it was built for the datacenter, i had to use an external desk fan to cool it. it was simultaneously completely impractical and totally awesome. ed: there's the beast. shocked you can still buy it! forgot it was scsi (which also made it even faster because the good adaptec scsi adapters of the day offloaded i/o interrupts from the main cpu)! https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8673a36ab2e165570a25b4b607f6b82&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=00-PB-PLA-BASE&utm_term=4575136603990180&utm_content=PB-PLA-ADG-BASE https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8...

et2o 5y ago
Amazing find. Just curious-why would anyone buy this today? For retro-computing/nostalgia??
- smashed 5y ago
  And who would on to such stock?? Surely these are not still manufactured??
- a-dub 5y ago
  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 running software that isn't backed up that no one even understands, yet is critical to some large business.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_yoqn 5y ago

I put a velociraptor in my first PC build back in 2009. I thought the small form factor mounted on a 3.5" heat sink was really neat.

gfody 5y ago

~2004 I whiteboxed a db server with 48 raptors (WD800GD) via 3 16-port sata raid controllers (areca ARC-1160 w/1gb dram and bbu modules), I striped all 16 in 3 raid0s and put them in a soft raid4 for ~2.5tb of speedy local attached storage. the datacenter guys thought I was nuts for using consumer stuff in a server but at the time sas prices were out of my reach and I was willing to take the risk. the server performed great and I eventually made 2 more of them before we were acquired and the pros took over - what's funny is the pros only used dell servers and ended up having to go with some outrageously expensive top-end models to get the iops that my whiteboxes were delivering. 144 raptors in production for 3 years under heavy load and we never lost a single drive. we had the servers sent back to us when they were decommissioned and most of the raptors ended up in peoples' workstations for another couple years and I never heard that any of those drives ever failed. legendary HDD

mrtweetyhack 5y ago
I never heard my old cars stopped running so they must be running
louwrentius 5y ago
Thank you for sharing this!
0xFF0123 5y ago
What does whitebox mean in this context?
- bestham 5y ago
  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.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    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.

oliwarner 5y ago

I miss the boot experience of my RAID0 Raptors. You could feel the machine turning on from across the room. I'd upgraded from ~5400 too, so it really was something special.

0xfeeddeadbeef 5y ago

I'm still using 500GB VelociRaptor (WDC WD5000HHTZ, made in 2012) as my "work drive". It's noisy, but fast enough.

KingMachiavelli 5y ago

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.