Will we EVER see 10kRPM ATA drives?!

[Xentropy]

This thread will be partially asking for opinions and partly seeking solid data.

The fact-finding portion is simple: WHY do IDE drives top out at 7200rpm when SCSI's got 15k and has had 10k for forever in computing terms? What hardware/technical reason for this is there, if any?

And the opinion portion: Does anyone think that SATA might be the excuse companies like Seagate need to finally bring performance to the mainstream? I think, or more accurately hope, it will.

I think of the hard drive as the worst bottleneck in any system (everything else is measured in nanoseconds, not even micro, and then the hard drive comes in at milliseconds, how awful!), so it's the thing I spend the most time focusing on when I try to build a new system, but I can never get over the price. FOUR TIMES THE COST for a couple of milliseconds of savings (by the time you add the SCSI adapter cost, that's what you're looking at).

So, I think there'd be a HUGE market out there for HIGH PERFORMANCE ATA drives. I don't mean the crap people call "high performance" today on the ATA side; I'm talking 10kRPM or even 15k.

Hopefully Serial ATA will get us there.

I might post a poll soon asking if people would buy a 10kRPM SATA drive for a SATA-ready system at a similar price to a SCSI drive (but with the advantage of NOT having the added cost of a SCSI controller). I know I would buy such a drive if it existed, so the market certainly wouldn't be nonexistant.

 

[ElDonAntonio]

I have no answers but you raise some very interesting points and I also have the same gripe about the speed of ATA VS the cost of SCSI.

Subscribing to the thread

 

[TonyB]

Correct me if im wrong but going from 7200 -> 10,000 would mean that area densities on the platter would decrease, so if they ever came out with a IDE 10k RPM drive, you wont be seeing the same sizes like we see today for 7200 RPM drives. Right now with Seagates new Cheetah 10k.6 drives we're beginning to see them break the 100GB barrier.

the way I see it is if they started making IDE 10,000RPM drives, nobody would buy them still because the cost of having one is still too high. If you look at the Cheetah 73LP, the thing costs about $700 for 70Gb's of space @ 10k RPM. If you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well buy hte SCSI version and get a scsi controller card as well.

Id say give it a few more years for costs to come down.

 

[Pariah]

I'll just cut and paste what I posted in another thread a bit down:

Maxtor has said late 2004. For Maxtor that would probably be at the earliest as they haven't released a single 15k SCSI drive yet, though they have announced plans. The release of SATA will probably push back the release of 10k drives even further though some think the opposite. Everyone will be getting SATA drives when they come out, which leaves no reason to release 10k drives as the consumer won't need additional incentive. Once the novelty of SATA wears off and consumers need another reason to go out and buy a new HD, then you may see 10k drives reaching the market. Demand is simply not there, the OEM market is still in the process of making 7200RPM drives a standard feature.

 

[Xentropy]

Originally posted by: TonyB
Correct me if im wrong but going from 7200 -> 10,000 would mean that area densities on the platter would decrease, so if they ever came out with a IDE 10k RPM drive, you wont be seeing the same sizes like we see today for 7200 RPM drives. Right now with Seagates new Cheetah 10k.6 drives we're beginning to see them break the 100GB barrier.

You're not wrong, but I'm currently running two 45G IDE drives with RAID0, and am quite happy with 90G of space. I don't need even close to 100G on a hard drive, and would gladly give up a bunch of space I don't use for higher speeds in the space I *do* use.

the way I see it is if they started making IDE 10,000RPM drives, nobody would buy them still because the cost of having one is still too high. If you look at the Cheetah 73LP, the thing costs about $700 for 70Gb's of space @ 10k RPM. If you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well buy hte SCSI version and get a scsi controller card as well.

You're inflating the true price quite a bit there. Quick look at Pricescan and you can find the 73LP for $500 pretty easily, and a 36LP is only $220, so getting multiples of those and RAIDing would be more cost-efficient at the moment. Therefore, I'll use the fair $6/GB SCSI pricing to make my rebuttal (you can find drives from other than Seagate as cheap as $5/GB). Similar best price/size ratio for IDE is about $1.50/GB.

For me, and I'm sure I'm not alone here, $220 for a 36G 10kRPM drive would DEFINITELY be a price I'd be willing to pay, IF it would work with my existing controllers instead of having to add $300 for a RAID SCSI on top of $880 for four of the drives to RAID together, not to mention try to find a controller for a 33Mhz 32-bit PCI slot instead of 64-bit and/or 66Mhz, a chore in itself.

Also, I think some of the cost of SCSI drives is just an "extra profit margin" built in because it's SCSI, so IMHO an ATA 36G 10kRPM drive would be *cheaper* than $220. I'd bet around $4/GB, or around $150 for 36GB.

So you're basically looking at:

144MB current 7200RPM IDE as two 72G drives RAID0'd = $216, no IDE RAID controller needed since it's built into most motherboards nowadays
144MB as four 36G 10kRPM SCSI drives RAID0'd = $880 for drives + $300 for a decent SCSI RAID controller (assuming you can even find one that'll fit in a mainstream mobo) = $1180
144MB as four of my proposed 36G 10kRPM IDE drives RAID0'd = $580 for drives, no extra controller needed (sure, 168% more expensive than straight IDE, but 50% LESS than SCSI)

Even if the 10kRPM IDE drives fetched the same premium as SCSI drives, you're still talking about a 25% cost savings by not having to purchase a SCSI RAID controller ($880 vs. $1180).

The key is mainstream + speed. In my opinion, fast hard drives aren't just for servers and SCSI anymore, and I'd like to see hard drive makers catch on. They finally caught on and brought RAID to IDE, now where's our high RPM operation? I'll pay a premium for performance, but lining the pockets of Adaptec along with those of Seagate just makes SCSI too rich for my blood.

 

[Soulkeeper]

next time i build a system i am gonna get the fastest scsi drive money can buy
even if it is only 18gb
I value speed much more than space
and if i do need to store things then i would just get a good 80gb ata drive and store movies and other stuff on it
ohh well

 

[TonyB]

how much $$ is too rich for your blood? you're talking about spending over $500 on hard drives. For that money you can do what Soulkeeper said and get the fastest hard drive available at the lowest size, the 15k.3 cheetah 18GB and grab a scsi card. then use a cheap IDE for storage.

As for mainstream, i think its gunna be hard to convince your average joe to buy something that is 36GB and costs $200 compared to something thats 120GB and $170 ie, WD1200JB. Plus we're talking about a marginal speed increase that I think normal people wont even notice.

I do however have to say this, the trend im seeing these days is that Bigger is better. I think that hard drive companies need to stop going bigger and concentrate more on faster. What I really like to see is SSD prices to go down in price and we all switch to ramdrives like the one from BitMicro.

 

[Leokor]

Technically speaking, any drive can be equipped with either the SCSI or the ATA interface and still have the same internal mechanics. Therefore, 10K ATA drives are certainly possible (and 15K ATA drives, too, by the way). Just strip their respective SCSI twins of the extra SCSI chip. But you won't see that done by any manufacturer any time soon. Here's why.

The SCSI drives are targeted mainly toward the enterprise market. It values performance above cost. Therefore, no effort is spared in making the SCSI drives perform to the best they can, the cost being no barrier. However, the ATA drives are geared toward the general consumer market, which values cost above performance. Listen, folks, the ATA drives manufacturers want them as cheap as damn possible (Maxtor even reduced their warranty to only one years to save on insurance costs). And 10K drives != cheap. They'd cost just about as much as their SCSI brethren, minus the price of the SCSI chip.

Leo

 

[McCarthy]

Old thread on same topic #1

Old thread on same topic #2

Old thread on same topic #3

Not a 'dude, use the search' reply at all, just a 'here are the comments of people who have already answered your question' one.

I still stand against heat and noise and am for reliability.... and, well, sure economy. Big caches don't make heat and noise problems or make reliability tougher to achieve, but do a nice job speeding things up. I'd also still like to see multispinrate drives, set it to 5400 in storage roles (or heck, 1000rpm) and use it full speed when it's used as a main drive where it'll get the most cooling. But that's me and I think I said that in one of those others.

--Mc

 

[Acanthus]

I'm all for someone changing storage completely. Why throw it on platters what you can put on 2ns srams, there you have it 2ns seek time, thats about 99999999999999999999% improvement. Now if it only didnt cost $15000 for a 2GB drive and you now see why we all dont have them yet, they need intel to start making some of those new high density Srams real cheap, and a real fast interface to transmit large amounts of data very quickly (SATA300?)

Edited for spelling

 

[Leo V]

Edit: I need to sleep more and post less.

 

[Pariah]

"I still stand against heat and noise and am for reliability...."

Look at the new Cheetah 15k.3, both problems have largely been eliminated, especially the noise. The new 10k.6 has not been reviewed yet, but there's nothing to make one believe that the drive won't perform even better than the 15k.3 in both areas.

"Now, I don't know the first thing about SCSI, but I have recently looked around and found the Adaptec AHA-2940U SCSI-160 controllers for under $40 shipped on Pricewatch."

The 2940U is an Ultra SCSI controller (20MB/s max) for CDROM drives and the like. The cheapest SCSI160 card with cables is probably the LSI card for about $115. Newegg has the 18GB Atlas 10K III for $127, which is a very good deal.

 

[Leokor]

Originally posted by: Pariah
"I still stand against heat and noise and am for reliability...."

Look at the new Cheetah 15k.3, both problems have largely been eliminated, especially the noise. The new 10k.6 has not been reviewed yet, but there's nothing to make one believe that the drive won't perform even better than the 15k.3 in both areas.

That's right. Cheetah 15K.3, which is a 15,000 rpm drive, is more quiet than IBM 60GXP and WD1200JB. It is also cool enough to be used without active cooling. Check out storagereview.com.

This is the review link: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200209/20020901ST373453LW_1.html
And this is the drive comparison link: http://www.storagereview.com/comparison.html
(among other things, you can sort drives by heat and noise)

Leo

 

[Leo V]

"The 2940U is an Ultra SCSI controller (20MB/s max)"

You are right... Two hours of sleep later, I don't know what incapacitated mental state I was in when I posted this garbage

 

[brinstar117]

Some day IDE will have 10,000 RPM drives, it's just a natural progression in the technology market. After all, there was once a time where the fastest SCSI drives were 7200 RPM and IDE was still chugging along at 5400 RPM.

By the time IDE reaches 10,000 RPM's, I shudder to think about the rotational speeds SCSI will be at. (I'm guessing computers of the the future would be nearly impossible to tip over due to gyroscopic forces )

 

[dullard]

My thoughts:
1) I disagree 100% with your statement that the HD is "the worst bottleneck in any system". For most people, the HD speed is nearly meaningless. They load their game/internet/word processor and wait 30 seconds. Then they play the game, browse the internet, write their letter for an hour or two without ever accessing the hard drive again (or if they do it is in the background and isn't the bottleneck). I'm sorry but a 30 second wait in a few hours of use isn't really a big bottleneck at all. They'd rather spend $100 more on a CPU or video card which will directly impact the speed of their game than spend $100 more to cut the load time from 30 seconds to 25. Sure there are some people who use the hard drive much more, but this is a rareity and that is what SCSI is for.
2) The 7200 rpm Western Digital drives with 8 MB buffer run most things faster than almost all 10K SCSI drives. Thus spindle speed is just one part of speed. Performance can be increased by much cheaper means. SCSI isn't all that it is cracked up to be - I switched from SCSI to faster IDE drives (even though the spindle speed dropped) and am completely happy with the results.
3) Dell has spend the last 1.5 years weaning people off of 5400 drives. The just recently removed any financial reason to buy a 5400 rpm drive. Other big companies are in the same boat. They just finally conviced the people to buy 7200 rpm drives - after lots of struggle. I can imagine that 10K IDE drives would be just as slow and difficult to transition to.

 

[Bovinicus]

It's all about compromise, just like everything else in the computer industry. Why do we use DRAM at all when SRAM is so much faster? Because it is infitely cheaper to put a small amount of SRAM on the CPU and use much cheaper DRAM. If ATA drives were made at 10K RPM, they would be just as expensive as SCSI drives, defeating the purpose. ATA technology focuses more on denser platters which increases capacity and seek times, as well as data transfer. Also, not everyone is a power user. Only 0-2% of computer users are power users. The average user could care less if their harddrive is slow or not, because they'll likely not notice unless the performance delta is very large. Then, there is also the factor of increased heat and increased harddrive failure at higher speeds. Oh yeah, and not to mention they are significantly louder. So, let's recap; ATA drives are quieter, cooler running, larger sized, cheaper, and perform very close to the levels of SCSI drives. Why toy with a good thing?

 

[Leo V]

Why toy with a good thing?

To make it better, otherwise we'd still be using 8086s.

The new 3rd-generation 15Krpm Cheetah shows that superfast disks can be both quiet and cool-running. In StorageReivew's database, it is quieter than many vaunted modern 7200RPM drives! It is quieter than my IBM 75GXP! And it spins double, who could have thought?

There are applications which don't care about seek times, but given the huge improvement from 5400 to 7200 (33% increase), I expect we will see another huge improvement in the move to 10Krpm (39% increase). And no point comparing 3-year-old 10Krpm scsi with today's 7200 ata. Today's newer 10krpm scsi drives can destroy most 7200 ata drives including mine.

 

[Xentropy]

Originally posted by: Leokor
Technically speaking, any drive can be equipped with either the SCSI or the ATA interface and still have the same internal mechanics. Therefore, 10K ATA drives are certainly possible (and 15K ATA drives, too, by the way). Just strip their respective SCSI twins of the extra SCSI chip.

Thanks, that was my main question. Is there any *technological*reason why not. And the answer is no, as I suspected. I can think of plenty of commercial reasons why not, but can refute those as well, which I'll do below.

The SCSI drives are targeted mainly toward the enterprise market. It values performance above cost. Therefore, no effort is spared in making the SCSI drives perform to the best they can, the cost being no barrier. However, the ATA drives are geared toward the general consumer market, which values cost above performance. Listen, folks, the ATA drives manufacturers want them as cheap as damn possible (Maxtor even reduced their warranty to only one years to save on insurance costs). And 10K drives != cheap. They'd cost just about as much as their SCSI brethren, minus the price of the SCSI chip.

What about the performance consumer market? The general consumers that go out and want top of the line? The ones willing to spend over $2k for a computer because they plan on gaming, video editing, etc., instead of being intensely drawn to a sub-$1k system because all they want to do is email and web browse anyway?

There's an entire market there being ignored by the hard drive manufacturers, a whole gaping hole labeled "midrange" in the hard drive market. You've got the lowball ATA drives for the guy who only needs a drive to store his email, and the super-highball SCSI drives priced such that "only businesses could possibly want this," which rubs me the wrong way the same way being overcharged for upstream bandwidth by broadband providers rubs me the wrong way. "Only businesses could possibly want more than 128k upstream, so if you want 768k, I'm sure you're willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for it, sir." The parallel there is very strong, because again there's no TECHNICAL reason, only commercial reasons, for upstream to cost more than downstream when it comes to DSL--cable is another story I admit.

There's NOTHING for people like me who want a speed level in-between without paying out the nose for a SCSI controller. You guys were quick to point out $150 controllers, but if you want RAID, you're looking at over $300, and typically on 64-bit PCI cards. And who *wouldn't* want RAID when the drives are so "small" as some of you were quick to point out?

So here I am, pleading to Seagate et al to produce and sell 10k and 15k SATA drives. They wouldn't have to be a high volume product, but since they already have production lines for making the SCSI versions, and all they'd have to do is *skip* the SCSI chip step at the end of the line to make these 10k/15k SATA drives, they wouldn't cost any more to make despite being low volume. I bet they'd sell more than they think, as well. WD produced "performance ATA" drives on a limited basis, and sold way more of those than they expected. There *is* a market for the midrange ("enthusiast"?), however much they'd like to ignore it.

To quote dullard:
"The 7200 rpm Western Digital drives with 8 MB buffer run most things faster than almost all 10K SCSI drives. Thus spindle speed is just one part of speed. Performance can be increased by much cheaper means."

Really? I didn't see the 7200rpm WD drives having <7ms seek times. Guess I missed that spec. I'm more concerned with seek than throughput -- the throughput of a 7200rpm is high enough to cover high bitrate video capture, and I can think of no reason for faster than that besides serving a ton of workstations. And the only way I've seen seek time improve is through an increase in spindle speed. If I'm wrong, PLEASE point me to an ATA drive with average seek under 7ms, I'll buy four of them right NOW, at any price (provided they remain cheaper than buying a SCSI card would add to a similar SCSI drive).

 

[dullard]

Originally posted by: Xentropy
Really? I didn't see the 7200rpm WD drives having <7ms seek times. Guess I missed that spec. I'm more concerned with seek than throughput -- the throughput of a 7200rpm is high enough to cover high bitrate video capture, and I can think of no reason for faster than that besides serving a ton of workstations. And the only way I've seen seek time improve is through an increase in spindle speed. If I'm wrong, PLEASE point me to an ATA drive with average seek under 7ms, I'll buy four of them right NOW, at any price (provided they remain cheaper than buying a SCSI card would add to a similar SCSI drive).

Read my post carefully. I said that specific drive was faster at MOST things - reading/writing multiple items under 10 kB is the one area that you really need a fast spindle. However I was saying most people don't care if Quake 3 has a 8 ms delay at the beginning of loading or if it has a 7 ms delay - we can't ever notice that small difference. You have one specific thing in mind that the vast majority of people never do. I was just pointing out that most of us don't need it, which disagrees with your statement that the HD is the bottleneck of any system - it just isn't for most of us.

RAID can increase throughput - but not seek times (RAID increases seek times since now you have to wait for the slower of the drives to finish its seek). You just said you need fast seek times and not a high transfer rate. So you don't need RAID according to your statements. Thus you don't need an expensive controller.

There is an in-between that you claim doesn't exist. 5400 rpm for cheap large drives, 7200 rpm for in-between, and 10k+ for high end. You just want a high end drive for the in-bewteen price. I don't see the advantage for drive manufacturers to sell them like that.

10K Cheetah drives do start at $29 shipped. You might not like their capacity or performance, but cheap SCSI drives are available...

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Pariah
I'll just cut and paste what I posted in another thread a bit down:

Maxtor has said late 2004. For Maxtor that would probably be at the earliest as they haven't released a single 15k SCSI drive yet, though they have announced plans. The release of SATA will probably push back the release of 10k drives even further though some think the opposite. Everyone will be getting SATA drives when they come out, which leaves no reason to release 10k drives as the consumer won't need additional incentive. Once the novelty of SATA wears off and consumers need another reason to go out and buy a new HD, then you may see 10k drives reaching the market. Demand is simply not there, the OEM market is still in the process of making 7200RPM drives a standard feature.

Demand not there??? I'd think everyone would want faster hard drive technologies. Most of the rest of the computer's subsystems are now able to transfer in speeds measureable in GIGABYTES/Second, while the hard drive can only achieve burst speeds of 133MB/sec?

1) I disagree 100% with your statement that the HD is "the worst bottleneck in any system".

Well from a technical standpoint, it is - see what I said in the paragraph above; well, I guess that something like a CD-drive or floppy drive is slower still, but they are more "peripheral-type" devices than is a hard drive.

Dell has spend the last 1.5 years weaning people off of 5400 drives.

I got my first 7200 drive recently, and I don't ever want to go back to 5400. Maintenance tasks like scandisk run so much faster now, and the system just plain seems faster with it. I guess that's just me though.

 

[Xentropy]

Originally posted by: dullard

Read my post carefully. I said that specific drive was faster at MOST things - reading/writing multiple items under 10 kB is the one area that you really need a fast spindle. However I was saying most people don't care if Quake 3 has a 8 ms delay at the beginning of loading or if it has a 7 ms delay - we can't ever notice that small difference. You have one specific thing in mind that the vast majority of people never do. I was just pointing out that most of us don't need it, which disagrees with your statement that the HD is the bottleneck of any system - it just isn't for most of us.

You act like HD speed only comes into play when loading software. Ever watch the little red light on the front of your case? While playing most games, even with the 512MB of memory I have, my hard drive accesses quite frequently during the game.

RAID can increase throughput - but not seek times (RAID increases seek times since now you have to wait for the slower of the drives to finish its seek). You just said you need fast seek times and not a high transfer rate. So you don't need RAID according to your statements. Thus you don't need an expensive controller.

I need RAID because I don't want 100 partitions, I want one large drive. I got burned out on partitions when using the 511MB partitions you pretty much had to use with FAT to avoid large clusters. Now that I'm using NTFS, I want one large C drive, period, and the only way to do that with smaller per-drive SCSI sizes is to RAID stripe them, else obviously each drive will be a partition. The seek time increase with RAID is minimal (actually tests the exact same with my particular drives before and after striping), a tenth of a second or less most of the time.

There is an in-between that you claim doesn't exist. 5400 rpm for cheap large drives, 7200 rpm for in-between, and 10k+ for high end.

7200rpm is not midrange. 7200rpm is very low performance but high density. 5400rpm is ancient history and even the OEMs are dropping them. You're looking at the market of 3 years ago in the above statement. Today's market, after pushing the 7200rpm into the low end and leaving the 10k+ in the high end by not bringing 10k to IDE, has completely thrown away the midrange, and I want something in the midrange. I don't want 15k speeds for 10k prices, I want 10k to come to IDE where the prices can come down slightly and not require me to buy an expensive extra controller.

10K Cheetah drives do start at $29 shipped. You might not like their capacity or performance, but cheap SCSI drives are available...

Just makes my point above. I don't want 50 2GB partitions, I want one large drive, so RAID would be necessary, especially if using those cheap SCSI drives.

 

[ElDonAntonio]

I agree that the HD is the damn slowest thing in my computer and that it bugs the heck out of me. Ever had ~10 programs open? try to switch from one app to the other, and you're certainly going to wait a good dozen of seconds while Windows slaps around the swap file. Same thing when opening/closing a few programs at a time, scanning the drive, running an antivirus, etc.

Those of you saying "I don't care waiting 8ms while Quake3 is loading" obviously don't understand what the hard drive is doing besides storing Quake3.

 

[Auric]

You are putting the horse before the cart because you cannot see the forest for the trees... or something. I do not EVER *want* a 10k RPM drive. I do not want motor based storage at all because they are inherently slow, noisy, and prone to failure. What I want is something better, like aforementioned solid state or whatever.

 

[BD231]

Originally posted by: ElDonAntonio
I agree that the HD is the damn slowest thing in my computer and that it bugs the heck out of me. Ever had ~10 programs open? try to switch from one app to the other, and you're certainly going to wait a good dozen of seconds while Windows slaps around the swap file. Same thing when opening/closing a few programs at a time, scanning the drive, running an antivirus, etc.

Those of you saying "I don't care waiting 8ms while Quake3 is loading" obviously don't understand what the hard drive is doing besides storing Quake3.

I dont thinka 10,000rpm drive will compinsate for all of that. I'd much rather wait for solid sate storage because the amount of heat computers are starting to put out is ridiculous, and a 10,000rpm drive will make the heat factor even worse.