Review Western Digital 8TB HDD Review: Not Back in Black

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The Historical Fidelity

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bit_user said:
I used to run WD Black drives in my backup/media RAID, but switched to WD Gold in the latest upgrade. I wonder how an 8 TB Gold drive would compare.
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I second that comparison. Also, it would be interesting to bring out the old 10,000 rpm velociraptors to see if cache improvements/platter #/CMR (aka Rust Arrangement) beat good old rotational velocity.
 
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bit_user

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The Historical Fidelity said:
Also, it would be interesting to bring out the old 10,000 rpm velociraptors to see if cache improvements/platter #/CMR (aka Rust Arrangement) beat good old rotational velocity.
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Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how they compare on 4k random IOPS.

As for sequential performance, I'm pretty sure the platter density improvements of modern drives have long-ago surpassed those drives (which topped out at only 1 TB, IIRC).
 
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The Historical Fidelity

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bit_user said:
Yeah, it'd be interesting to see how they compare on 4k random IOPS.

As for sequential performance, I'm pretty sure the platter density improvements of modern drives have long-ago surpassed those drives (which topped out at only 1 TB, IIRC).
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Good point on platter density! Makes me wonder how fast the 10,000 rpm drives would be today if they kept up with modern tech, for that matter, didn’t they also make 15,000 rpm enterprise drives? Theoretically if performance scaled linearly, a 15,000 rpm “caviar black” would have ~550 MB/s sustained read which is basically fully saturating the SATA 3 interface.
 
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The Historical Fidelity said:
Good point on platter density! Makes me wonder how fast the 10,000 rpm drives would be today if they kept up with modern tech, for that matter, didn’t they also make 15,000 rpm enterprise drives? Theoretically if performance scaled linearly, a 15,000 rpm “caviar black” would have ~550 MB/s sustained read which is basically fully saturating the SATA 3 interface.
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Be careful about extrapolating. I think they only used 2.5" drive platters, even when the drive had a 3.5" case. I know the later 10k and 15k RPM drives came only in 2.5" form factors, at least.

With a modern drive, the peak media transfer rate will correspond to the outer tracks. Therefore, you couldn't just multiply by the ratio of RPMs to get the modern equivalent. However, if you found the actual platter diameters, I think you could just apply that ratio as a correction factor.
 
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Gillerer

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High RPM drives use smaller platters. Not only semi-modern enterprise HDDs, but also later generation Velociraptors. They were thick 2.5" drives, but had a sturdy metal adapter block allowing installing in a 3.5" slot.

*

A point about a difference between desktop <-> NAS/Enterprise. Their firmwares are tuned differently:

Desktop drive:
  • expects to be a stand-alone drive
  • does error recovery all on its own
  • the assumption is that the disk contains the only copy of the data, so it's important to read and reallocate a failed sector as soon as possible
  • will keep re-trying for a long time in case of read errors
  • the excessively long response time in case of errors may cause the storage pool to drop the drive as failed/unresponsive
NAS/Enterprise drive:
  • expects an overarching redundant data storage system that will take care of data recovery
  • will give up quickly in case of read errors
  • quick response ensures that it will not be dropped out of a pool for a mere read error (the data can be read off another place in the storage system or reconstructed from redundancy data)
In addition to this, there are marketing claims by manufacturers that NAS/Enterprise drives are built to be more reliable in arrays (with ranges of "recommended" array sizes per tier of drive). The idea is that vibrations from neighboring drives would normally be a large factor in failures. This can be mitigated with the drive's physical construction and the gas used to fill it.
 
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Sluggotg

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My first WD Black was the 74GB Raptor. Over the years I went to the 150/300/600GB versions. My Favorite was the 150GB with the built in Window. You could watch the drive head move across the platter. It was noisy and it was hard to mount it somewhere that allowed for viewing the Window.
It is a bummer that the WD Black line has fallen so far. ( I even own stock in them and Seagate). The WD Black series was the Best Consumer Hard Drives available for years. Now, they are just a slightly faster version of the WB Blue drives.
I tried to post a picture of them, but I didn't realize I would have to host them somewhere. I will resolve the hosting issue some other time.
 
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kyzarvs

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The Historical Fidelity said:
Yeah talk about a fast setup for the time!
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I had 2x 80gb 10k Raptors as a RAID0 boot drive for my Windows XP setup back in the day - I still say it was faster than W10 on NVME to boot. They were noisy drives, but sensationally fast for spinners and XP had such less data overhead.

I still have at least one 'raptor in a drawer along with a nvidia GTX280
 
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