Why cant HDD's run faster

[Acid Panda]

I see this as more of a general discussion.

 

So since HDD's have been round much longer so the technology has had more time to mature so why is the most common speed that we see 5,400 or 7,200 (I use these numbers for simplicity) and not direct fact.

I respect that the SSD is more advanced in almost all facets and that fact that moving parts have an impact on performance but after a little and i mean a little research the fastest well reviewed HDD was about 10,000 and it was not reviewed that well. plus you cannot really compare they two since they are so drastically different in their operation. 

Is the reason for this is the the speed of the platter moving reaches a point of noise and vibration that it would cause issues and people wanting to shy away from it as a product.

or that its not worth the production costs are not worth it in the end?

 

I'm not trying to compare HDD to SSD.

 

looking forward to answers

[Velcade]

How fast can you spin a platter?  I believe the limitations on a HDD are physical.

[GrockleTD]

3 minutes ago, Velcade said:

How fast can you spin a platter?  I believe the limitations on a HDD are physical.

Yup. Past a certain point the platters would basically explode

[minibois]

Yeah, it's not just not that convenient to have your harddrive looking like this just to get that extra bit of performance:

\

 

Plus the main issue in HDD's would be the random seek times, which of course would be faster with a faster spinning drive, but I don't think you will have drastic performance increases (sorry I have to compare them to SSD's) especially compared to an SSD's random read performance.

[GoodBytes]

20 minutes ago, Acid Panda said:

I see this as more of a general discussion.

 

So since HDD's have been round much longer so the technology has had more time to mature so why is the most common speed that we see 5,400 or 7,200 (I use these numbers for simplicity) and not faster.

They are faster, you have 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM HDDs.

The issue is sound and cost... 2 thing that consumers sees as major downside to get any interest, especially that you reach SSD prices for the same/similar drive capacity.

 

Western Digital tried 10,000 RPM drive on the consumer end in the past. with a large heatsink to cool off the drive itself as it assumes you are not in a server where you have fans directly pointing at the drive running full blast. While performance was better (for an HDD at the time), consumers didn't jump on it, not even most gamers, due to price and sound. Plus, like SSDs, gaming performance in load time isn't really affected. Sure it was a bit faster (still a lot slower than SSDs), but not worth it. It's not the few seconds it gives that will make a difference.

 

Also, the problem with HDDs is not speed itself, but seek time. It takes a long time for the drive to get data which is all over the place. HDD biggest issue is that data is scattered all the place as the drive only writes at the first available spot it encounters.

 

Quote

I respect that the SSD is more advanced in almost all facets and that fact that moving parts have an impact on performance but after a little and i mean a little the fastest well reviewed HDD was about 10,000 and it was not reviewed that well. plus you cannot really compare they two since they are so drastically different in their operation. 

Is the reason for this is the the speed of the platter moving reaches a point of noise and vibration that it would cause issues and people wanting to shy away from it as a product.

It will eventually shatter. The same is true with disk drives. It is for a reason why CD's were limited to 52X speeds (you had drives with faster speeds, but those were not sustained, and only on some specific disks). Same for DVD and BluRay, they have a speed, and those are pretty much their max speed already.

 

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or that its not worth the production costs are not worth it in the end?

Not worth it in the end. SSD is replacing HDDs. 

[Random_User]

SSDs already consume less power than HDDs and are much faster. For the platters to spin fast enough to come close to the same performance the platters would either break or the drive would consume so much power that it just wouldn't make any sense to use it.

[Mira Yurizaki]

18 minutes ago, Acid Panda said:

I see this as more of a general discussion.

 

So since HDD's have been round much longer so the technology has had more time to mature so why is the most common speed that we see 5,400 or 7,200 (I use these numbers for simplicity) and not faster.

I respect that the SSD is more advanced in almost all facets and that fact that moving parts have an impact on performance but after a little and i mean a little the fastest well reviewed HDD was about 10,000 and it was not reviewed that well. plus you cannot really compare they two since they are so drastically different in their operation. 

Is the reason for this is the the speed of the platter moving reaches a point of noise and vibration that it would cause issues and people wanting to shy away from it as a product.

or that its not worth the production costs are not worth it in the end?

The problem is that HDDs are mechanical devices. Physics dictates how fast something can move without needing stronger material or other factors like noise and vibration, especially when you have something spinning > 10K RPM. There's also the fact that the head needs to find the data first before it can be read out.

 

However, that isn't to say HDDs have stagnated over time. Areal density of data has had a steady effect on bandwidth performance. ~7200 RPM 6TB drives can achieve a sustained sequential read of 200MB/sec. So not quite the blistering pace of even a SATA SSD, but certainly much better than < 100 MB/sec of 10 years ago.

[TVwazhere]

1 minute ago, VegetableStu said:

same thing with HDD platters

170000 fps starts at 6:09

[GoodBytes]

To add:

 

Only in server applications you have 15,000 RPM HDD, high density drives, as no one care about sound, as it is already in an massive A/C room and each system is packed with fans running at nothing else than max speed pushing massive amount of cool air. In addition, price is not as big of an issue for a company as it is for most consumers. So if a 1TB HDD is 1000$, it is a lot of money for sure, but for a company, if it means a better consumer experience on a solution that bring millions of dollars, that 1000$ for that drive isn't that much, and a worthy return on investment. You, as a consumer, will probably go and say.. "WAT?!? I can get the fastest NVMe drive that destroys the drive performance, a new high-end GPU and still have money for games for that price! Sure I don't have the the max reliability, but I don't plan to actually trash the drive 24/7 for years with reads and/or writes to care about the benefit of the Server HDD that it can bring, and get a much quieter system. And I don't care about the fancy warranty it comes with. The odds that a drive fails is slim, and the very worse, I am out for a week while waiting for my replacement drive under warranty and re-install the OS (something that is not acceptable in a corporate environment that seek 0 downtime)".

 

Another issue with high speed drives:

What the video shows is that external vibrations can affect their performance. This is much less of an issue with slower drives.

[BuckGup]

15.6K drive are everywhere in the datacenter and server world. GoodBytes explained why pretty well 

[jones177]

28 minutes ago, Acid Panda said:

I see this as more of a general discussion.

 

So since HDD's have been round much longer so the technology has had more time to mature so why is the most common speed that we see 5,400 or 7,200 (I use these numbers for simplicity) and not direct fact.

I respect that the SSD is more advanced in almost all facets and that fact that moving parts have an impact on performance but after a little and i mean a little the fastest well reviewed HDD was about 10,000 and it was not reviewed that well. plus you cannot really compare they two since they are so drastically different in their operation. 

Is the reason for this is the the speed of the platter moving reaches a point of noise and vibration that it would cause issues and people wanting to shy away from it as a product.

or that its not worth the production costs are not worth it in the end?

 

I'm not trying to compare HDD to SSD.

 

looking forward to answers

I used WD 10,000rpm Raptors from 2007 to 2018.

They had a burst read speed that could almost equal(401MB/sec) a SATA SSD. They could not load Windows much faster than a regular HDD so most people did not see the point in them. 

 

I used them for taking out the load-in stutter in my modded openworld Simulations/games. 

 

I tried to replace the Raptors with WD 5tb Blacks in 2016 and that was a dismal failure so I had to replace the Blacks with 1tb SATA SSDs a week later.

My last Raptor died in 2018 and it was purchased in 2011 so I got my money's worth out of them.

 

Some of my load-ins now are over 480MB/sec so I am moving from SATA SSDs to NVMes. The funny thing is like the Raptors the gain in loading Windows over a SATA SSD makes them pointless for that task.  

 

 

  

 

 

 

[kpluck]

It looks like more actuators are going to give mechanical HDs a boost…

 

Quote

Seagate engineers have set a new record for how fast data can stream data off of a hard drive. With a Seagate hard drive equipped with MACH.2 — the first ever to sport this first-generation dual actuator HDD technology, Seagate has demonstrated up to 480MB/s sustained throughput — the fastest ever from a single hard drive, and 60 percent faster than a 15K drive.

 

Seagate MACH.2 Multi Actuator technology doubles IOPS performance in a single hard drive by using two independent actuators that can transfer data to the host computer concurrently.

 

-kp

[Mira Yurizaki]

Also I would argue that 10K and 15K drives were only really sought out for their seek times, not their bandwidth since it wasn't that much better than slower drives.* Data centers typically aren't shoving around terabytes of data at once, but are usually servicing thousands of requests for different bits of data.

 

And I'd argue for most use cases for most people, how quick a memory device can get something is much more important than how fast it can shove it down a pipe.

 

*https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/storage/western-digital-velociraptor-300gb-review/3/ 

https://hothardware.com/reviews/western-digital-velociraptor-300gb

[BleachedFur]

3 hours ago, Acid Panda said:

I see this as more of a general discussion.

 

uhhhh

 

my Seagate Barracuda Compute 4TB has 7 platters and like 350mb/s sequential read/write and 250mb/s random seek. It only costs $70 NOB.

 

FRAPS is a screen capture program know for massive file sizes and heavy write cycles. Having slow writes will drop frames in whatever is being captured. My seagate compute can withstand the full write brunt of 1440p capture without dropping any frames.

 

I don't know what shitty hard drives you're using but new HDDs are very good for general purpose use.

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Not worth it in the end. SSD is replacing HDDs. 

Basically this in the long run.  HDD's are getting hardware and harder to improve, I believe seagate are working on dual actuators but in the end this is like the best improvement they have had since 2004ish?

 

For interests sake it's also the reason worm drives didn't take off domestically, they had an extreme storage advantage (like HDD do today) but were very slow and unlike hdd's today were very expensive.

[Trik'Stari]

3 hours ago, GrockleTD said:

Yup. Past a certain point the platters would basically explode

Mythbusters did this with CD's

 

@LinusTech should do this with hard drive platters.

 

Edit: I originally said SSD's. I had a long day and my brain was the dumb.

(I hate delivering boxes full of laptops. I'm so fucking exhausted)

[Tamesh16]

4 hours ago, GrockleTD said:

platters would basically explode

yup at some point the disk cant handle the centrifugal force at a given speed

they are videos on line of spinning cds and such that you can see what happens

even if they dont break, at  a point they start to wobble, which isnt great for hdds

[Chiyawa]

Actually, many manufacturer didn't like to increase speed beyond 7200rpm is vibration. Higher speed creates more vibration. Not just in your PC, but internal read heads and platters. You need a sophisticated controller to properly control the platters and read heads from vibration, and that incurs the most cost.

 

Also, the error rate. Higher speed HDD has little margin of errors compare to slower speed HDD.