3 ms·
Hard drives are at this stage where no one will really miss them given their performance vs SSDs, but still common enough to not attract nostalgia. I think it i
by cm2187 4y ago
Hard drives are at this stage where no one will really miss them given their performance vs SSDs, but still common enough to not attract nostalgia. I think it is still mind blowing that such a cheap device can move a physical head over a disk within a minuscule precision, both in term of position and distance above the disk, and this many times per second. Yes it doesn’t do a million iops, it only does like 10 iops, but I am still impressed we get those 10 iops on a cheap consumer devices that stores TBs of data.
- jasongill 4y agoI know you're making an exaggerated comparison, but 10 IOPS would be closer to the performance of a floppy disk than even a 5400rpm consumer hard drive (depending on workload, of course). Imagine if we still had to deal with the performance of floppy drives on a daily basis!
- cm2187 4y agoActually I thought this was 10. Just double checked and a consumer drive in more like 50. Floppy disk seems to be less than 5.
- pjdesno 4y agoWD says that the track width on their newest drives is about 50nm. The servo has to position the head with an accuracy considerably smaller than that, especially for writes - for reads you can just try again if you're off center. (which is why some drives have different seek time numbers for read and write - they don't need as much "settling time" for reads) For comparison, green light has a wavelength of about 550nm.