6 ms·

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 upp

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.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  And if people remember Bryan Cantrill datacenter vibration video, it quickly becomes problematic.
  - louwrentius 5y ago
    That was Brendan Gregg :-)
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      oh right, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 it was on bryan's youtube only
- myrandomcomment 5y ago
  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.
  - jquery 5y ago
    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 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?
    - 5y ago
bombcar 5y ago
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.
- Trigg3r 5y ago
  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
  - camhenlin 5y ago
    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?
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    A 50x CD drive actually reaches 10,000RPM, and that's with a cheap and wide piece of plastic. So I really doubt holding together is the limiting factor for these drives.
- pengaru 5y ago
  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...
  - donw 5y ago
    F1 engines are rebuilt after every race. Hard drives have slightly higher longevity requirements.
    - 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.

agumonkey 5y ago
And if people remember Bryan Cantrill datacenter vibration video, it quickly becomes problematic.
- louwrentius 5y ago
  That was Brendan Gregg :-)
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    oh right, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 it was on bryan's youtube only
myrandomcomment 5y ago
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.
- jquery 5y ago
  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 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?
  - 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

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.

Trigg3r 5y ago
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
- camhenlin 5y ago
  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?
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  A 50x CD drive actually reaches 10,000RPM, and that's with a cheap and wide piece of plastic. So I really doubt holding together is the limiting factor for these drives.
pengaru 5y ago
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...
- donw 5y ago
  F1 engines are rebuilt after every race. Hard drives have slightly higher longevity requirements.
  - 5y ago