[HN Gopher] An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor ___________________________________________________________________ An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor Author : louwrentius Score : 76 points Date : 2021-10-30 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (louwrentius.com) (TXT) w3m dump (louwrentius.com) | Trigg3r wrote: | Bit of a blast from the past, I did own one of these and | certainly it felt faster than anything I had used before. Am I | right in saying 10k RPM is about the upper limit for spinning | disks? | RedShift1 wrote: | Servers used to have 15k RPM drives but that segment has | diminished in favor of SSDs. | louwrentius wrote: | There are also 15,000 RPM drives but they were exclusive to the | server market. They were small and extremely loud. | | Their IOPs and latency was even better. | | Funny: | | https://www.servethehome.com/seagate-launches-final-15k-rpm-... | cerved wrote: | "In summary, 15K RPM hard drives are less dense, use more | power and have performance somewhere between 1/4th and | 1/300th of a SSD." | cricalix wrote: | 15k RPM drives existed too. Seagate Cheetah for instance. | mattowen_uk wrote: | Not as SATA or IDE? The Cheetah is SAS/SCSI I think. I have | (somewhere) a 15k RPM 143GB SCSI drive which I used in a home | built Windows Server machine for a while. At the time, I had | _never_ seen Windows boot that fast. Ahhh.. simpler times. | cerved wrote: | No. There's a tradeoff. Faster drives means more power, more | heat, more vibrations, more noise, less durability. Spinning | disk is mainly about price per byte at good performance - | there's simply no market. | myrandomcomment wrote: | 100%. This is why when I ordered my home NAS I pick 5400RPM | NAS drives (FreeNAS Mini). The WD Red drives in my current | system have been spinning since 2014, 4x4TB in a mirrored | stripped set for a whopping 8TB of space + 2x120GB Evo write | caches (mirrored). | | The key to speed is having lots of drives, RAM and SSD write | cache. | | I plan on getting the new TrueNAS Mini XL this year with | 8x14TB. | jquery wrote: | Hey, I'm building a computer with lots of storage, you | sound like someone who knows what they're doing... maybe | you could help me... currently the plan is: | | 3x Firecuda 4tb NVME | | 2x QVO 8tb SATA SSD | | 4x WD Ultrastar 18tb. | | My use case is I need tons of storage that operates fast | and is used for all sorts of things (creative work, gaming, | archiving, job processing), sometimes all at the same time. | It's a threadripper pro workstation pc, so I have spare | PCIE slots to upgrade later. | | I'm thinking of replacing a couple of the QVO SSDs with | Ultrastars and using a couple of the FireCudas as cache | drives for the platter drives. Good idea or bad idea? Would | I be making a meaningful tradeoff or should I just go for | the extra space? | myrandomcomment wrote: | Depends on what OS you are running. In my case I am using | TrueNAS so it is made for being a NAS and you can just | tell it, hey here is a cache, here is a log drive, etc. | | If you are talking about local storage for a workstation | then I am not sure. Depends on your workflow. If you have | a "work on this on the fast stuff, then when I am done I | can move it to the spinning rust" then you might want to | figure out largest project size for fast vs long term | storage of the projects. | | Sorry if this is not helpful. | dragontamer wrote: | A lot of WD 5400RPM drives are actually 7200RPM | unfortunately. | | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/western-digital- | is-t... | | Basically, WD decided if was cheaper to just make 7200 | drives and sell some mislabeled as a '5400 class' drive. | agumonkey wrote: | And if people remember Bryan Cantrill datacenter vibration | video, it quickly becomes problematic. | louwrentius wrote: | That was Brendan Gregg :-) | agumonkey wrote: | oh right, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 | | it was on bryan's youtube only | bombcar wrote: | 20,000 RPM disks were trialed but I don't know if they ever saw | production. Part of the problem is keeping the platters | together at those speeds; and about that time SSDs took over. | Trigg3r wrote: | Yeah that's what I thought, similar to CD's couldn't spin | much faster without shattering iirc, rather than being a head | read speed issue | camhenlin wrote: | Yes I had a 52x drive in the early 00s shatter a cheap | writable CD (I think rated at 24x or something along those | lines) and I was picking bits out of the drive to get it | working again. But then again, a CD is an insanely cheap | piece of plastic, so how fast should we expect it to | reliably spin at? | pengaru wrote: | 20k rpm is relatively clunky F1 combustion engine territory. | | I find it hard to believe spinning an electric motor and a | relatively light and small disc that fast is much of a | challenge to keep together, especially in such a coddled | environment. | | Even back in the early 90s my RC10 had a 38k rpm "modified" | motor; the Motown Missile. That thing lived through hell... | guerby wrote: | Tesla Model S Plaid electric motor is said to reach 20k RPM | but needs to be carbon-sleeved: | | https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/o4k0xa/up_to_ | 2... | baybal2 wrote: | NR750 went to 21 thousand | | CBR250rr to 20, and those were actually street legal, and | there are still a lot of them on the roads. | donw wrote: | F1 engines are rebuilt after every race. | | Hard drives have slightly higher longevity requirements. | pengaru wrote: | > F1 engines are rebuilt after every race. | | Even if what you said were true, so what? | | We're talking about a tiny spinning disc on a brushless | hub motor. There's basically a single moving part, maybe | a few more if riding on ball bearings. | | Do you have any understanding of what is going on inside | a many-cylinder internal combustion piston engine | spinning at 20k rpm? We can view the flywheel as the hard | disk platter equivalent, the real madness is at the | reciprocating mass being flung back and forth at the same | rate. | | Edit: Here's another useful reference point to help put | RPM numbers into perspective: a turbocharger's rotating | assembly spins on the order of 200-300k RPM without | flying apart. A minute is a pretty long time. | jquery wrote: | You're underselling what HDDs do. The seeks they have to | do are so precision, if you made the hard drive the size | of the earth, the "head" would still only be a couple | meters from the ground and it would have to go any square | meter on the entire earth in 1/100 of a second. It's | absolutely incredible that the tiny SATA bay in my | computer holds an 18TB drive. That's 18 * 8 trillion bits | of data, or if the hard drive had the surface area of the | earth, 282 bits per square meter. | | This precision structure has to be maintained at 10k RPM. | Can it be maintained at 20k RPM? Maybe not so easily. | Let's not undersell the technology. | myrandomcomment wrote: | This is 100% not true. The engines are sealed by the FIA | and replacing parts of the engine incurs gird penalties. | You have a limit of 4 engines a year you can swap without | a penalty. In the last 2 races both Lewis and Valtteri | took penalties for swapping out the ICE part of the | system. When Max had the crash at Silverstone with Lewis, | RedBull was not 100% sure of the state of the engine as | they are not allowed to disassemble it. They had to use | fiber optic cameras to look inside. Even then they got it | wrong and Max took a new engine in Turkey. | jbister wrote: | Being pedantic, the modern engines that you're talking | about don't run at 20,000 RPM either, they are limited to | 15,000 RPM and I believe they basically never actually | reach that limit, usually topping out at 12,000-13,000 | instead. | | When the engines did run closer to 20,000 they were | indeed rebuilt much more often. I am not well versed in | F1 regulation history but Wikipedia claims that before | 2005 engines were not required to last for two race | weekends[1], meaning you could rebuild the engine between | each race weekend if you wanted to. At that time there | was no RPM limit[2] for the engines and the iconic | Ferrari F2004 supposedly maxed out at 19,000 RPM[3]. | | So maybe the comment you are replying to is referring to | pre-2005 F1 engines :) I have no idea myself if a modern | F1 engine could run at 20,000 and still be as durable as | the current engines or if running at such high RPM | inherently means bad durability. | | 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Formula_One_World_C | hampio... | | 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_One_engines#Engi | ne_spe... | | 3. | https://www.f1technical.net/f1db/cars/873/ferrari-f2004 | myrandomcomment wrote: | In the turbo-hybrid era the rules are as I have outlined, | you cannot rebuild between races. The current engine is a | V6 @ 15000RPM. | | https://jalopnik.com/how-formula-ones-amazing-new-hybrid- | tur... | | In the past the rules were different. | bombcar wrote: | Those motors don't need to keep minuscule tracks lined up | with increasingly small read/write heads. A dremel spins at | 40k RPM but even though seek times are low total storage is | also low. | RedShift1 wrote: | Unfortunately these drives had a high failure rate which probably | didn't help their popularity. | louwrentius wrote: | I wasn't aware of that, frankly. Do you have any sources for | that? And are you talking about Raptors or Velociraptors? | RedShift1 wrote: | I used to work in a PC shop and many of them came back. I had | 2 raptors of my own and both of them failed after a few | years. I know it's anecdotal but this was a niche item so if | you see a lot of returns you know it's bad. This applies to | mostly the raptors, we never sold any velociraptors. | louwrentius wrote: | Ok, fair enough, thanks for sharing. | cricalix wrote: | I can't remember if they failed as badly as the IBM Deathstar.. | sorry, Deskstar | (https://www.extremetech.com/computing/326292-why-lying- | about...). Those things were notorious for failing. | krylon wrote: | I used to own an ancient Sun SparcStation with a Barracuda 10k | RPM disk, and the noise it made was just ... too much. It sounded | like a combination of a fighter jet taking off and a dentist | drilling into my skull. | | Fortunately, that machine supported diskless operations, which | was painfully slow, but ... that machine was painfully slow | anyway (by 2005 standards), and it was part of what I liked about | it. | | Years later, I ran into a CAD workstation with a 10k RPM disk | drive, and the noise was just ridiculous. I was so certain it | _had_ to be a fan until my coworker replaced the disk drive, I | felt rather sheepish afterwards. | | I sometimes miss good old HDDs, because you could tell if they | were busy just by listening. But considering the godawful noise | the really fast HDDs made, SSDs are a blessing. | TacticalCoder wrote: | > I sometimes miss good old HDDs, because you could tell if | they were busy just by listening. But considering the godawful | noise the really fast HDDs made, SSDs are a blessing. | | Oh indeed! | | I used to run my HDDs in soundproofed enclosures (a company was | selling those back in the days) but of course it would make | them overheat. So I'd cut a square hole in the HDD enclosure | (and through the soundproofing foam inside the enclosure) and | then I'd put a large but quiet fan on top of the HDD. This | worked great, for years. | | Having owned silent computers like the Commodore C64 / C128 and | Amiga the switch to the early ultra noisy PC was particularly | painful to me. So back when "silent PCs" weren't a thing I made | my own: I'd run fans at 7 V instead of 12 (by using the 12 V | and 5 V pins to create 7 V), I had my neighbor (electrical | engineer) create me a device I'd put into all my PSUs that'd | turn the PSU's fan off when the heat wasn't too high (back then | this didn't exist: but I wanted one anyway so I had my neighbor | "invent" one and I'd then replicate it in all my PSUs) and... | When I found these HDD "quietening" enclosures, I ordered so | many the company asked me if I wanted to become the official | importer for the Benelux area : ) | | I'd have super quiet "panaflo" fans shipped to me from Japan | and I'd replace all my PSU / CPU / tower fans with these quiet | fans. | | So basically I had quiet PCs before it was a thing. | | Nowadays I just buy Be Quiet! PSUs / fans and a well insulated | tower and I'm a happy camper. Things got _way_ quieter : ) | louwrentius wrote: | Younger generations have absolutely no idea how much noise a | computer of that era made, even if it didn't have a 10,000 RPM | drive. And most people accepted it. | jaynetics wrote: | Thinking back it seems as if the user's needs were much less | central back then, and as if each component was trying to win | the contest for your attention. | | CD-ROM: wrrroooooo | | HDD: sssrrrrrrrr clankclankclank ssssrrrr | | PC-Speaker when pressing too many keys: MEEEEP | | Modem: booooob, boop beep boop beep boop boop bli blu bri bru | brrriiiiii BWANG BWANG BWANG KCHHHHHHHHH | ccakes wrote: | I had a WD740 back in the day, remember them costing a small | fortune compared to 7200rpm disks but it felt worth it! | mechanical_bear wrote: | Ah, takes me back to my first enthusiast build, an overclocked | Pentium D 830, 1gb ram, and two of these drives in Raid 0. It | felt pretty wild for the time. | tom_ wrote: | Around that time (2004 or 2005), thanks to a giveaway from a work | client who'd downsized, I got a PC with a SCSI card and two | 10,000 RPM SCSI hard drives. (No idea what type... all I remember | is the RPM.) I'd previously been using my ex-work PC from 2001, | so this was a nice upgrade. More MBs, more GHz, bigger HD. | | First port of call was a chkdsk, of course - and one of the | drives had some bad sectors. It happens. I threw it in the bin, | and reinstalled Windows on the other one, which was fine. Mmm... | it was so fast! That's what you get from those extra GHz and MBs, | of course. 4 years is a long time in computer performance terms. | | After about a year of very enjoyable super fast PC use, the hard | drive died. I replaced it with some generic UDMA IDE thing - and | discovered almost immediately how much the 10,000 RPM SCSI drive | had been bringing to the table :/ | dehrmann wrote: | Wasn't part of the motivation for moving to 2.5" seek time? The | arm has a shorter distance to travel? | | I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an | oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. Hard | drives store data from the outside in, so you can improve latency | by minimizing arm travel, and improve throughput by storing data | where the linear velocity is faster. No idea how big of a | difference this would make. | qball wrote: | >I heard about a hack I never tried, myself, where you buy an | oversized hard drive and only use the beginning of it. | | It's actually kind of funny that "just using the beginning 25%" | of the drive is completely unnecessary provided you've got your | partitions set up properly- you just create a partition at the | beginning of the disk that has the data you want to access the | quickest, and use the end of the disk for data that you don't | access coincident with the data you want to get the fastest (a | perfect place to put a dual-booted Linux install, for | instance). | bombcar wrote: | The problem is if you use the other 75% _at all_ in normal | use it slows the 25%. A separate operating system would work | well though. | thecal wrote: | That's called short-stroking - | https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157... | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | _Chuckles_ | louwrentius wrote: | Yes, short-stroking - as it is called - was indeed a trick to | get better performance out of a hard drive. | | However, latency is about both the latency of the arm movement | and the rotational latency. The latter you can't overcome by | short-stroking. | | However, short-stroking does point to an interesting problem | when hard drives were still relevant. | | If you didn't size your storage right, you ran out of IOPs long | before you ran out of capacity. | | For instance, if you run VMs on your SAN / storage array, you | may have to stop putting VMs on the storage long before | capacity is reached. | p_l wrote: | Move to 2.5" was mostly about drive slot density, not speed, as | for some time it was easier to reach high speed in bigger | package. | Zenst wrote: | Lovely drives - built a system with 3 of them - 2x74Gb one for OS | and another for core programs and a 32GB one dedicated to | swap/TEMP. Got well over a decade solid use out of those and only | just retired the last of those drives last month. | | They did do a later generation that could do 15k RPM but by then | SSD's were starting to become trusted and more palatable price | wise, though I dare an SSD of that ere to work near on 24/7 for | ten years solid abuse. | louwrentius wrote: | I don't think that the (Veloci)raptor ever reached 15,000 RPM. | Such drives do exist but as far as I know, they always were | exclusive to the server market. | r0s wrote: | I have one of these on my shelf, kept as a memento after | switching to SSDs. | | All my other old HDDs are still here in spirit, stripped of their | powerful magnets now decorating my fridge. | p1mrx wrote: | The edge of a 3.5 inch platter spinning at 10000 rpm moves at | 3.5*pi*10000 inches/minute, which is 47 m/s or 104 MPH. | | I'm a bit surprised that it's slower than a car. | serf wrote: | not much around that's as satisfying sounding as starting up a | big full-size ATX case crammed with raptors. | | starting up a big lathe or mill spindle, or maybe a large phase | converter with a heavy lever switch come close, but they don't | scratch that "i'm in a super computer lab" itch as much as the | fantastic whir of a raptor RAID. | | utilitarian feature : you could hear a bad sector from anywhere | in a large room. | linker3000 wrote: | I used to work for HGST (now absorbed into WD) in the EMEA | Enterprise Support lab. My main role was setting up PoC/testing | systems, and support for high capacity SAS/helium drives, | although I mostly worked with high-capacity flash boards and | arrays. | | The 15K rpm drives could sometimes be quite noisy; especially | with 48 or more in an array. | | Three of the engineers with whom I worked specialised in disk | failure analysis; one of their tools was an inductive telephone | earpiece pickup coil with suction cup, connected to a small | amplified speaker. These guys would put the pickup on top of a | drive and listen to all the electronics, spindle motor and | head-moving voice coil electromagnetic noise as the drive spun | up. This process would generally be followed by comments such | as: "Hmm, head 4 sounds iffy", "This unit's on older firmware" | and "Sounds like the heads aren't coming off the ramp"... | | A lost/fading talent now that 2 out of 3 are retired". It was | quite amazing to watch and listen to these guys at work. | xattt wrote: | I believe this sort of acoustic analysis for failure is still | used in wind turbines. | tiernano wrote: | I have 300GB wd velociraptors for many years in one of my | machines... going back 10 years, only got replaced last | year... probably didn't need to be replaced, one drive out of | a raid 0 array died, the other probably still works... | | but on the note of hearing differences in sounds, back in the | day of dial up, since my ISP gave unlimited free dial up | minutes, but it had to last no more than 2 hours (it would | auto kick you off if you were on for more than 2) my modem | would dial every 2 hours... And it got to a stage that I | could know, by sound, if it was going to get a 56k link or a | 33.6k link... | xvf22 wrote: | I can totally relate, I could also tell the link speed by | the noises. | ggreer wrote: | The motors in a Tesla can go up to 18,000rpm (20,000rpm in the | carbon-wrapped Plaid motors). They sound pretty cool when you | floor it.[1] Though once you pick up speed all you can hear is | wind noise. | | 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rg75JbVOpg | kayson wrote: | These drives felt so amazing back then. I put two in RAID0 in the | first PC I ever built and it seemed mind blowingly fast. Super | expensive at the time compared to other storage, but it was the | best you could get on consumer grade hardware (i.e. SATA). For | some reason I feel more fondly about the Raptors than I do about | my first SSD (an Intel X25-M). Maybe it's just age... | crypt0x wrote: | Came here to make exactly this post. Thank you. | hef19898 wrote: | An SSD is soulless, a Veliciraptor was top of the line | unicorn Mike beast of HDDs. I still habe one in my old Tower, | happily running. Not even too noisy. Well, at least not if | you don't use a SSD equppied machine when bo Fans are running | as a comparison. | Svperstar wrote: | I was still in college when the Raptor came out. I had an | affluent friend who put two in RAID0 and I never saw Windows XP | boot up so fast. He has some kind of solution rigged up for the | noise so it was noticeable but pretty muffled. I was so jealous | with my standard WD 7200 rpm drive. | steve_adams_86 wrote: | I know for me there's something innately gratifying about the | hardware actually becoming faster, not just the storage | functions. It's like a faster car, or some other machine | actually doing whatever it does with more power and precision. | | SSDs are totally better, yeah. But it's also kind of boring | from a mechanical perspective. Insanely beefy mechanical hard | drives have a certain charm that SSDs will never have. | lttlrck wrote: | This sentiment also maps onto BEV and ICE for me. I love the | utility, performance and efficiency of newer tech, but | mechanical _machines_ are far more awe inspiring to me. They | 're more organic somehow, even though that's the definition | of an oxymoron. Haha. | endymi0n wrote: | I dunno. | | Like, yeah, I get it. There's quite a few sounds that trigger | emotional reactions in me. | | The whirring and buzzing of the PSU. The Award BIOS beep. The | seeking sound of an empty 3.5 inch disk drive. The slight CRT | zang between different resolutions - and the electrical drizzle | of degaussing such a beast. | | But to this day nothing amazes me more than opening a MacBook | and it being dead silent. | | Maybe it's because I have young kids, maybe it's because I used | to be an audio recording hobbyist (and isolating computer sound | was always a pain). | | But there's nothing I enjoy more than the powerful sound of | silence. | avereveard wrote: | same, I had these for a decade, and it was great. a little | noisy, but I miss the trattatatatata of them seeking. | steve_adams_86 wrote: | We got some giant disc drives in our office a while back and | I hadn't heard that sound in maybe a decade or more. It | brought me back in a split second when I first heard it | again, haha. | | It's incredibly nostalgic. | DigitallyFidget wrote: | I still have my eight Velociraptors I used in a RAID5 (7 used, | one backup) back in the day. It's in a box in my garage. I've | meant to toss them out, because I know I will never used them, | but it's just such a hard thing to bring myself to do. I mean, | they're such powerful and capable drives, but like the article | mentions, they're obsoleted by even cheap SSDs. | progman32 wrote: | I still have my Raptor X, the one with the clear window in the | top cover. Used it until 2017 or so because the enjoyment I got | seeing the head whiz around was far greater than marginally | faster loading on an SSD! I'm sure I'll use the drive again on a | retro project eventually. | a-dub wrote: | in the mid 90s, i once found a 2gb barracuda (1st gen 7200rpm | 3.5" double height hard disk) in the ez-ad. there wasn't much | market for huge server type drives where i lived, and the owner | was interested in a trade of some random bike parts and a cd-rom | drive (a screaming deal, but honestly he just wanted to get rid | of it). | | it would heat the whole case it was mounted in and make enough | noise to be heard rooms away... but it was fast! and two | gigabytes was enough for not just one but mulitple linux | partitions alongside windows and os/2. | | i remember a friend's father losing his shit when i told him i | had such a large disk. because it was built for the datacenter, i | had to use an external desk fan to cool it. it was simultaneously | completely impractical and totally awesome. | | ed: there's the beast. shocked you can still buy it! forgot it | was scsi (which also made it even faster because the good adaptec | scsi adapters of the day offloaded i/o interrupts from the main | cpu)! | https://www.priceblaze.com/st12550n.html?ref=gshp&msclkid=e8... | olgeni wrote: | I got 2 - try the smartctl short test on them if you have one | available, then record it and send it to your friends :D | CrazyCatDog wrote: | I tried to order a v-raptor around 2009, IT wouldn't have it, | "they burn out at 30% off the useful line of a standard speed | drive." | | Still wish I had pushed back! | allenrb wrote: | I had one of these, same model as the author and around the same | time. Was running some sort of desktop Linux, maybe Fedora? | Either way, latency really _is_ the key. It's hard to grasp just | how much quicker even a cheap SSD is for random I /O today. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-30 23:00 UTC)