pocketdrummer writes:
> then I would jump at the chance of using a pair of these as my
> Audio Drive for recording.
A drive like this is total overkill for recording audio. Any existing 15K
disk will do, indeed any 10K disk, or for that matter any decent SATA.
Audio requires a tiny amount of bandwidth. See my
benchmark results page
mentioned above; simply find a disk that offers a minimum sustained
I/O which is comfortably above the bandwidth required for recording
uncompressed audio (at 64bit resolution if you want to be really paranoid),
which really is pretty much any of them.
xeysz writes:
> I refuse to do business with Hitachi. I had a 500 GB Hitachi
> internal and it died shortly after a year of (infrequent) use. ...
(shortly after a year? That's a wierd way of putting it, given many
consumer disks only have a 1 year warranty.
)
If that was a SATA, then it's no surprise. SATAs from any vendor can
die in short order. If you want quality and 24/7 reliability then
don't buy conventional SATA; it's is totally different ball game. You
get what you pay for when it comes to SATA, eg. most SATAs are not
designed for 24/7 use, which is why the 'RAID class' SATAs cost 2X
more than generic versions, eg. check prices for Seagate models whose
model numbers end in 'NS'.
I know of plenty of people who've had equally bad problems with Seagate (eg.
a movie studio sent eight seagate AS drives, ALL of them failed in less
than a week), and let us not forget Seagate's recent firmware fiasco.
> there's just no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on a 15K RPM HDD or 60-120 GB flash drive.
Depends on the 15K (plenty of models available 2nd-hand) and it
depends on what you're doing. I find I have to search my email
archive for some item of information many times a day - a 15K drive
speeds up this operation by some 40% compared to a SCSI 10K, while a
typical 7200pm SATA is by comparison _massively_ slower (check my
access time search test results).
amdgamer666 writes:
> I think somebody should make one though, it'd put a velociraptor to shame.
There are already numerous models of 15K which leave the WD VR in the
dust, but they're not consumer-type drives. Totally different market
segment, eg. large cache RAM, high reliability, etc.
liquidsnake718 writes:
> these should already be bigger than 184GB of storage capacity by now.
There are already numerous models of 15K drive much larger than this,
eg. the older 450GB Seagate 15K.6 FC. More recently there's the 600GB
Seagate 15K.7.
wildwell writes:
> I don't think there are any E-class SSDs yet, and this thing will
> write a lot faster. For personal use though, I think my laptop's
> getting an SSD.
There are various Enterprise SSD products, eg. SUN's recent SSD SAN
product, and existing designs such as this:
http://hothardware.com/News/RamSan620-Is-Worlds-Largest-SLC-Flash-SSD
They are not, however, normally aimed at general data storage (though
I suppose one could use for that if money was no object). Rather,
they are ideal for holding indexing data, meta data, that sort of
thing, where the tiny access times make a huge difference to search
times. And btw, the RamSan620 costs $220K.
For consumers, the current crop of SSDs give more than enough of a
boost over conventional HDDs to be worth investing in even now. Just
don't buy a cheap one because they're garbage.
I can't afford the good models of SSD which are available just now
though, so I compromise by buying 2nd-hand 15K SCSI, eg. the 300GB
15K in my
main SGI system only cost me 80 UKP (approx. $120) while
the 146GB 15K in
my PC (system disk) cost me 40 UKP (approx. $60).
If you want better quality than ordinary SATA, but can't afford
current SSDs or Enterprise 15K, then hunt for ordinary 2nd-hand 15K
SCSI/FC/SAS, or failing that then grab a WD VR which are certainly
very good, beating many older 15Ks because of its modern design, and
the low noise/heat of the WD VR is excellent. Plenty of bargains to
be had, especially drives which still have valid end user warranties
(look for Seagate/Maxtor for this). The beauty of SATA is raw storage
at low cost. Thus, I have lots of 15K SCSI for speed (RAID0 for
uncompressed HD with Flame), but I bought a couple of 1TB Samsung
SATAs (Spinpoint F1) for storage (large movie files) and I'm very
happy with them, but I'll always use 15K SCSI/FC/SAS or, when I can
one day afford it, an SSD for a system drive.
If you have family who don't know what to buy you for xmas, then ask
for an Intel X25 SSD.
Simple example: the person who sold me the
WD VR shown on my test page. He sold it because he was upgrading to 2
x X25s in RAID0, about which he said, "It is very very nice. Average
read at around 450MB/sec and write at 150MB/sec and access around 0.2ms."
Ian.
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