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10,000 rpm WD SATA-EIDE drives on the way! 5.2ms seektimes!

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My god I've spent years being ticked off at HD companies for not making an IDE 10K HD. However will this be a growing trend since the interface will be so much better, aka will we start seeing 12K and 15K drives? I doubt it! Frankly I think they'll keep the market divided with SCSI one place and SATA in another sure we'll have 10K RPM HDs but I think they'll keep the Hot Rod HDs expensive and on the SCSI Interface.

-Christian

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It's a nice enough idea and I think it is safe to assume that WD will sell a fair few of these units.

However there are still flaws in the plan, generation 1 SATA still has bandwidth limitations, the 150mb/sec is purely theortetical as anything ATA100 up is.

Then the two issues surrounding IDE drives that WD must have magically sorted out before the release of this drive.

 

1. Heat - One of the only reasons we haven't had 10k IDE drives before was because of heat. IBM released a paper on it ages ago and heat combined with the other IDE limitations made 10k IDE non viable.

2. Sound - I could afford SCSI if I really wanted to. If I wanted the best possible performance then SCSI still is the way to go, but even if I demanded that kind of performance SCSI would put me off because of the noise of the drives.

10k drives are simply not quiet and over the past year, year and a half a lot of people have been concentrating on silent or very quiet running machines.

 

This is certainly not the end of SCSI, seek times with this unit are comparible but sustained transfer is not.

I'll be giving this one a miss and see what kind of performance is available from generation 2 SATA in about 8-12 months time.

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Hi BladeRunner,

I too have no immediate plans to adopt SATA. I mean for starters just look at what you get if you put an 'n' on the end of it laugh. My main reason being, I used to work at MS and have read hundreds of bugs related to data loss for a variety of reasons. One of the major causes is using new drive interfaces like USB in 1995 or Firewire, when it first came out. Another cause of data loss I recall was an excessive cache size like those in the WD 8MB drives. I take this policy with software too where I usually lag a version behind. I wait until things are supported and fixed and then I join the parade. I too won't be trying SATA until SATA 2 and when an OS ships with support for it out of the box.

Adios Amigos,

Christian

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10000rpm IDE drives would be very useful to certain people. Especially those who don't want to shell out on SCSI drives and controllers. But IMHO I can't see gamers needing these drives. But there are gamers kiddies out there who'll buy em just to say they have the best. I think they will sell these drives.

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Oh don't you know it smile

"Will this upgrade increase my 3DMark score" is an absolutely classic post over at FutureMark and it so makes me laugh.

Lets be honest, if you are building a new machine that has SATA ports on the mainboard and this new WD 10,000rpm drive isn't that much more than a standard 7200 IDE drive then you'd probably be crazy not to go for it.

However if you've got anything ATA100 or higher at 7200rpm and of a good capacity you really would be crazy to fork out just to "have the best".

But people will - I can only assume that once these people get some kind of responsabilities (partners, houses, etc) they will realise that throwing money at a PC every three months is a little bit silly.

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Quote:
Christianb, I am curious on your noting data loss on these disks due to larger buffers... how so? During crashes & powerloss I could see this, but is there other reasons you have heard of?? apk

Hi Alec,
I believe the problem was endemic to EIDE drives with more than 2MB cache and it wasn't related to power outages. It was a problem with Microsoft's support for these drives in the OS. Somehow they weren't handling the cache size correctly on shutdown and any unwritten data (presumably beyond the 2MB mark) wasn't getting written to the disk.
-Christian

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Hi Alec,

It's been so long since I read about that issue. I'm starting to forget whether it was just a Windows 98 issue or if 2000 was affected too. The problem may have reared it's ugly head in both. Nonetheless it was probably 2 years ago I read about that issue. Fixes have long since been issued. Windows XP surely doesn't have that problem and Windows 2000 SP2+ shouldn't either. The Windows 98 SE update for that is available on Windows Update. I assume whatever flaws there were you have long since patched your way out of them smile.

So Long Buddy,

Christian

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Hi Alec,

I can certainly understand your being worried data loss is never a laughing matter, unless you loose a DIVX video file of a spice girls concert. In which case you can just say I was going to delete it anyways laugh.

-Christian

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I don't trust review sites on seek times. Toms has my drives at 13 to 14ms. I actually get 12.1ms or even 11.8 on some days.

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WD has already made 15k (or 10k) IDE rpm drives have they not? that come in 18g and 36g sizes...... - this was early this year or last year some time.

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