[HN Gopher] An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
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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.
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(page generated 2021-10-30 23:00 UTC)