Where are the 10000 and 15000rpm IDE drives?

[Chaotic42]

It's coming up on new hard drive time, and I'd like to get a pair of really fast drives. Capacity isn't as important as speed, I don't need 200GB. I *would* like 2 smoking 60Gigers. I can't afford SCSI yet, and I can't find any >7200rpm IDE drives.

What's up?

 

[bozo1]

Where are they? Nowhere!

Probably due to the fact that the vast majority of IDE drives are sold to OEM's and home users, many of whom will not pay the extra bucks for the extra speed. The vast majority of SCSI drives are sold to OEMs for use in servers - business users can and will pay for the extra speed.

On top of that, there are the IDE bus speed limitations that don't exist in the SCSI world.

 

[bacillus]

<< I *would* like 2 smoking 60Gigers >>


smoking is bad for you!

 

[Viper GTS]

The answer is simple:

The HD companies don't want to encroach upon their much more lucrative SCSI market share by releasing IDE drives that are faster (or at least close enough that people don't want SCSI).

Viper GTS

 

[bozo1]

There is still the bus limitation. Why no speed difference between ATA100 and ATA133? The bus is already maxed out.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

<< There is still the bus limitation. Why no speed difference between ATA100 and ATA133? The bus is already maxed out. >>


you're either wording something wrong, or you have no idea what you are talking about.

 

[McCarthy]

The answer is simple enough. There's not sufficient demand.

For those who need the speed there's some really fast SCSI stuff around. If you can't afford that then you don't need it, just want it

Besides, there are a few problems with introducting 10,000 or higher drives to the market. Aside from techincal problems which may make them more difficult/expensive to make and therefore more expensive to sell.
A) Price - see above
B) Heat - OEMs don't want more heat. With drive cages placed in current cases without much regard to HD heat, neither do most home builders, whether they know it or not.
C) Noise - aside from a few very disturbed people who actually want to make their computers louder and run 80mm Delta 7k fans on everything including their chipset heatsink, people don't want more noise.

Can you get a 10,000 rpm drive as quiet and cool as a 7200? Probably. For more expense.

Look at Western Digital, they brought out their special edition drives with the 8meg buffer. Brought the performance up higher than any other 7200rpm around, to where a 10k or 15k IDE drive with a tiny buffer would be in most situations. Did people go nuts for it? Nope. Few bought them, most looked at the price tag and kept buying 2meg buffer drives.

I disagree with Viper to a small extent. If they brought out 10k IDE drives for the same price as 10K SCSI drives would that take away from the SCSI market? Or just kill their sales in the IDE market until they gave up and went back to 7200 drives? If you assume that 10k IDE drives will come out at the same price disparity that the 7200 drives have AND perform as well as 10K SCSI drives, then your point holds. My example of 10k IDE drives being as high in price as 10k SCSI isn't likely either though. Somewhere inbetween lies the actual market condition.

Just as a final note, I don't want 10k IDE drives. For the noise and heat reasons. I'd prefer to be able to slow my current 7200 drives down to 5400. If there was a utility around to do that I'd run it on all my drives except maybe my C: drive, but that's me. Or maybe I'm just biased because the IBM 60GXP I bought which was supposed to be so much faster than say the Maxtor 5400rpm it was replacing didn't actually make my system feel any faster. What it did do was develope bad sectors and lead to losing some data and now the fuss of an RMA. Some performance boost that is. Give me reliable, cool, reliable, quiet, reliable as the top goals in an IDE drive and then get around to performance if there's time.

As for your situation, WD's with the 8meg buffer should do quiet nicely. Not sure what the smallest size they start at is.

--Mc

 

[ElFenix]

pm posted a good post in the last thread... basically what it boiled down to was IDE is about driving areal densities and platter sizes, while scsi is about rotation speed, and you can't have both. 10,000 rpm drives can't have the densities that slower drives do. its simply not possible at the moment. and most home users are too dumb to know that one hard drive, which is smaller, could even be faster. i mean it. you don't know the depth of stupidity of the average home user until you deal with 50 new ones on a daily basis. "how many MHz is that drive?" "i was supposed to get 512 MHz of memory and they only gave me 256." "is that on the monitor or on the hard drive? (hard drive refering to the actual computer, not the component inside actually called the hard drive)" businesses don't want 10,000 rpm drives in their systems either. when you have 1,000 computers in a building you don't want the noise. silent is pretty much a requirement of the systems. home users don't want the noise either. people walk into my room and say, damn, your computer is loud (delta 80 SHE fan), though i have it insulated on the outside and a hand towel draped over the back to kill the noise coming out the exhaust fans.

 

[Chaotic42]

Thanks everyone, your posts have been really informative. My drives are just old (2x12GB Maxtor 5400s), and I was getting greedy.

As for the noise, I have a Delta fan, I forget the model number now, but it's plenty noisy. I wouldn't even notice the drives (I can't hear mine at all now)

 

[CWoolmer]

ur best bet is RAID is you want speed. Get two 5400 rpm drives and use parity stripping so a bit to one drive, bit to another so it loads of two drives, this way, ull easily beat a 10,000rpm

Craig

P.S.- Adaptec best for RAID cards, IBM best for hdds

 

[Windogg]

ur best bet is RAID is you want speed. Get two 5400 rpm drives and use parity stripping so a bit to one drive, bit to another so it loads of two drives, this way, ull easily beat a 10,000rpm

Craig

P.S.- Adaptec best for RAID cards, IBM best for hdds

Very vague and very wrong in many respects.

RAID0 is dangerous but the only choice for speed. Even then it is nowhere close to a 100% speed increase. I highly douby 2 5400RPM drives will beat a good 10K RPM SCSI. The whole point of RAID0 is performance so 5400RPM drives are silly considering how the small price difference to step up to 7200 RPM. Remember use RAID0 at your own peril.

Adaptec certainly does not make the best RAID cards. They make good ones but not the best ones.

I won't even begin to comment on IBM hard drives.

Windogg

 

[sharkeeper]

<< Adaptec best for RAID cards, IBM best for hdds >>



What kind of rock have you been living under? I want to know because that's where I want to be when a 500 km rock smacks the earth!

Cheers!

 

[rockhard]

<< It's coming up on new hard drive time, and I'd like to get a pair of really fast drives >>


Fast 7200rpm drive recommendations - Maxtor D740X or WD 8mb SE's.
Raid card - On the cheap - Highpoint. Not so cheap - 3Ware 7xxx series.

FWIW speed is only half the story with IDE HD's whatever you do with them with raid.
Once you load them up with multiple simultaneous read/writes the performance drops off so fast it isnt funny
This is when SCSI is far superior from my own experience.

If youve got money to burn on a couple of WD 8mb SE's and a decent IDE raid card you may be better off looking at a single 10K SCSI drive and minimum U2W controller.

 

[Athlon4all]

Its several things:

1. Lack of demand
2. The drive manufacturer's wanting to keep SCSI on top

I also remember like someone mentioned that Rand said about this issue, in terms of platters and density sizes. I feel all these are issues. I will also add that like someone said, the added heat and noise isn't exactly desireable. We may be able to deal it with, but most won't. But rest assured, the day a 10k or 15k IDE drive comes out, ITS MINE!!!!!!

 

[Hanpan]

To the best of my knowledge the biggest obstical is platter (arial) density. IN order to reduce misses and errors at higher rotational speeds the density must be less. In real terms currently large hdd's would need to be much bigger and have many more platters than currents drives at 10K. THis would drive up cost and get you close to scsi. IN such a senario there would be no point as scsi is already more lucrative. IN fact one will notice only WD that does not manufactur any scsi devices has pushed current ide technology (in terms of new features) with their 8mb cache drives.

 

[pukemon]

<< ur best bet is RAID is you want speed. Get two 5400 rpm drives and use parity stripping so a bit to one drive, bit to another so it loads of two drives, this way, ull easily beat a 10,000rpm

Craig

P.S.- Adaptec best for RAID cards, IBM best for hdds >>



Shoulda left that P.S. out... but anyways, Adaptec's Ultra160 SCSI RAID controllers are quite good. They are easy to set up and manage. Large companies are willing to pay for those, but most consumers probably won't. As for the noise, I bring earplugs to work because the server room is so damn noisy.

As for the IBM part, true in 1999. Not even remotely close to being true in 2002.

 

[McCarthy]

To take off on an old saying, I actually would touch another IBM drive with a 10 foot pole.

To swing at it I mean.

 

[pillage2001]

<< There is still the bus limitation. Why no speed difference between ATA100 and ATA133? The bus is already maxed out. >>



What has ATA100 or ATA133 got to do with 10000RPM drives?? If you say transfer speed is already at the limit a 133Mb/sec. You're wrong then. They hardly go above 66Mb/sec.

 

[Athlon4all]

<< What has ATA100 or ATA133 got to do with 10000RPM drives?? If you say transfer speed is already at the limit a 133Mb/sec. You're wrong then. They hardly go above 66Mb/sec. >>

It has everything to do with it. Because of the increase in RPM, that will increase the amount of data that will be transferred over the bus. That being said, ATA/100 is plenty for even 15K RPM drives.

 

[pillage2001]

<<

<< What has ATA100 or ATA133 got to do with 10000RPM drives?? If you say transfer speed is already at the limit a 133Mb/sec. You're wrong then. They hardly go above 66Mb/sec. >>

It has everything to do with it. Because of the increase in RPM, that will increase the amount of data that will be transferred over the bus. That being said, ATA/100 is plenty for even 15K RPM drives. >>




That is what I was trying to say. Maybe I phrased it wrongly. ATA100 and ATA133 is alot for 7200RPM and perhaps 10000RPM too.