SSD opposition

I just found this link:
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/06/06/western-digital-working-on-20-000-rpm-raptor/1

Bit-tech states:

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.


Does anyone think wd will be successful? What do you think the access time wil be on these? I'd think about 3-4ms. It seems SSDs are slowly losing the advantage in terms of access times.

 

Most of the SSD hard drives will be used by people or companies who require performance to access frequently used data quickly (such as network installations of a program), but there will still be the need of the regular hard drives for large storage purposes (say, multimedia editing or corporate records) at least for a few more years.

That is, until SSDs become real cheap in regard to price per gigabyte, increase their speed and manage better their limited writing cycles.

 

I don't understand why the HDD manufactures not only add a second arm with the read/write heads. This would increase access times, transfer rates, while the HDD speed is low.
Well, the HDD "controller" will get a bit more complicated, but this should be doable.

 

I think the magnetic HDD manufacturers are scared. I fully expect misinformation campaigns to become common over the next 12 months as the traditional storage manufacturers do everything in their power to convince us that HDD is better.

The 20K Raptor sounds nuts to be honest. The platters will be spinning so fast that it won't be any bigger than 2.5" ever, and it's going to generate a significant amount of heat and noise while drawing more power. By the time it ships, we'll have 256GB and 512GB SSD devices capable of sustain 200MB/sec. Exactly who are they trying to sell?

 

I agree. A good case in point is that 2 months ago the CEO of Seagate was publicly calling SSD's a bunch of crap. Now, less than 2 months later, he is looking to buy a Flash Memory FAB. Nuff said.

 

SSD is the future, all HDD manufactures can do is to postpone it as long as possible, just the same as all the film camera manufactures have moved to digital!

 

Yep. And it took awhile for the quality of digital to catch up. As it will take SSD's aawhile to catch up in size. They ain't gonna be a Terabyte anytime soon, but I will be quite happy with a cheap, fast 128GB, SLC, of course

 

That's a good analogy, the digital camera industry that is.

NOBODY thought twice about digital cameras as anything other than a niche for the longest time. That said, the early bird does not always get the worm. Kodak was first to the scene with a solid digital camera system (I think as early as 1991) but an eight year head-start didn't save them from Nikon's D1 in 1999. Likewise I think it's still a wide open race when it comes to SSDs.

That said, the Raptor (which was an incredibly exciting thing for me a few years ago with the first 36GB model) now gives me cause to believe that WD is barking up the wrong tree.

 

I like it... more ssd= more hard drive development