Western Digital working on 20,000 RPM Raptor

[Face]

According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers.

We have spoken to a lot of people out here in Taipei about this industry’s direction and one thing is becoming clear: SSDs are going to be affordable in the next 12 to 18 months.

Because of this, hard drive manufacturers are starting to get a little worried about what marketshare SSDs might eventually take away from them—especially where performance is more of a concern than storage capacity.

And that’s exactly what Western Digital’s Raptor line is all about.

The new drive will be very similar to the recently-released VelociRaptor, in that it’ll be a 2.5in drive with a custom 3.5in housing built around it. Details are incredibly light at this stage, given that the product is still in development, and we don’t even have a release timeframe at the moment.

However, our sources said that the drive will be ‘silent’ – that’s the last thing I would have expected from a drive with platters spinning at 20,000 RPM. Western Digital is apparently working on silencing the beast by improving the housing technology, which will now not just act as a heatsink, but also as a noise cancelling device. We’d also hope that the drive enclosure has some vibration dampening technology as well, because that’s also likely to be a problem given the high spindle speeds.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06...0-rpm-raptor/1

[MomijiTMO]

Holy moly.

[Shintai]

Honestly I would prefer an SSD..20000rpm... :o

HDs should just be for large storage.

[xlink]

oohh I kinda want one now...

[LaMpiR]

THey should have been doing this a looong time ago...

[Slay0r]

nice, if just this came before SSDs. they're a bit late to the party in my opinion, expecially since ssd prices are slowly but steadily dropping, and the more companies join the distribution the lower the price will be pushed.

WD just dont wanna put the mechanical era behind them do they at 20k rpm i can see the chance of failures being somewhat tangible..

[Lightning_Rider]

Aw man I just bought the Velociraptor!

[cegras]

RPM doesn't really generate noise. My old 36 Raptor is only loud on seeks .. not spindle noise.

[Macadamia]

Can it blend? (No, not the passive voice)

My concerns are over heat. Geez, they JUST made the Velociraptor a much better HDD to own than the Raptors, and now this.

[3NZ0]

RPM doesn't really generate noise. My old 36 Raptor is only loud on seeks .. not spindle noise.

As spindle speed increases, so does noise.

Compare fast 5.4k, 7.2k, 10k and 15k drives and you will notice a big difference.

15k drives are amazingly quick but they also make as much noise and heat as a thermite.

[Serra]

This tells me something: they clearly could have done this before, but just choose not to because they didn't *have* to.

At the same time though, this is a downright stupid solution. How is their solution not to integrate some memory onto the drive itself? Heck, if Gigabyte could make a $120 DDR memory module dealie that acted as a hard drive (and that's retail cost folks, not manufacturing cost), WD could surely just integrate some memory chips into a hard drive.

For $300 I'm sure they could just as well produce a 300+GB drive with 10+GB of memory chips sitting on it.

[Sparky]

So they then will charge what, $6 per GB?

No thanks, I'll stick with $70 for 250GB. Raptors are and always have been overpriced.

[YMAA]

*want*

[largon]

I'd would actually be excited if the topic was:
"Western Digital working on 0 RPM SSD Raptor"

[XS Janus]

It will be interesting. But it sounds desperate.
That dinosaur tech needs to die out.
SSD FTW and hdd manufactures could be caught unprepared if they are not careful

[003]

My next hard drive.

[naokaji]

Server hdd's have been stuck at 15k rpm for years now... about time someone steps up and puts the bar higher.

[STaRGaZeR]

Stop developing HDD's, and put some money and effort in making faster and more reliable SSD's...

[safan80]

SSDs taking over the market would be great.
20k rpm for a hard drive should be easy. With 15rpm and 10 rpm drives being out for so long in the enterprise market I see no reason why they haven't been out in the desktop market. The hard drive manufacturers have been milking 7200 rpm desktop drives for too long and they deserve to get their butts kicked by SSDs for it.

[p2501]

I've heard about 20k scsi drive years before, why the do they want to do this now that ssd's are rolling?

[Helmore]

Stop developing HDD's, and put some money and effort in making faster and more reliable SSD's...

As for the SSD development part: they already managed to make them reliable, especially compared to conventional HDDs. Improvements in speed are coming along quite nicely, their main focus should be cheaper SSDs with great performance.
As for a 20k rpm raptor, sign me in. I'd love to have one of those as they will probably be a lot cheaper than SSDs. Any word on release dates? Q4 would do fine for me....

[dinos22]

ROFL
imagine installing 4x20K RPM drives in a case
you would need to have a special sound/vibration proof room for the ing thing hehehehe

SSD FTW

[Zaskar]

Will this really show a notable improvement if its using SATA still instead of some faster interface like SAS?

Cant believe their long term R&D has been on further increasing Hard Drive speed instead of working on converting to the newer technology.

Its like a Camara company refusing to admit that film is dead.

[Richard Dower]

This is rather exciting news, just wish it would come to market quickly as these new VR are peaking my interest. I'm guessing with 20k RPM the access times will be cut, what...in half?, maybe 2ms access time?
I'd also like to see the embedded cache go way up, 32MB at LEAST but WD should push things further and go 64MB....be trend setting Western Digital!

[Goreg]

they would take off at that speed :P