back to article WD pushes out super-slim shock-resistant Ultrabook drive

Western Digital has crafted up a slim half-terabyte single platter drive that uses the least power of all Ultrabook disk drive on the market. WD says it is also the most shock-resistant Ultrabook drive yet. The 6.8mm thin Scorpio Blue comes in 320GB and 500GB capacities, spins at 5,400rpm and has a 4000Gs operating shock …

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  1. Malcolm Weir Silver badge
    WTF?

    Careful...

    I really don't think Seagate says that it's drive streams data at up to 300GB/sec.

    Think about a 320GB drive; I doubt you can read it in 1.07 seconds, even if you were not limited by the nearly three orders of magnitude slower SATA interface (3Gb/s vs 2.4Tb/s).

  2. joejack
    FAIL

    False advertising, failed reporting

    "Seagate says the Momentus Thin can stream data at up to 300GB/sec; WD doesn't provide a streaming data figure."

    So, the drive moves data faster than the 300Gb/sec bus it utilizes? Even sans the typo, a 5400rpm drive isn't going to move more than about 100Mb/sec over SATA3 (that's megabits, not gigabits). Looks like Seagate wins the "misleading advertising" award, and El Reg the "failed reporting" award for parroting it back.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive#Data_transfer_rate

    1. Simon Harris

      Re: False advertising, failed reporting

      Seagate's actual figures are on their website...

      here.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So you like Western Digital then.

  4. Mage Silver badge

    Speed depends on what is happening

    Spin Speed (RPM) 7200 RPM

    Average latency 4.17ms

    Random read seek time 11ms

    I/O data transfer rate 300MB/s

    Obviously if you are "recording" HD video and randomly opening documents.... 300MB/s is a peak.

  5. Steve Todd
    Stop

    Near SSD performance?

    Not even close. If ALL you are comparing is sequential read speed then a *peak* of 300MB/sec doesn't compare well to the sustained 550MB/sec that a decent SSD can manage today. When it comes to latency and random IO the HD gets creamed by a couple of orders of magnitude.

    1. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Re: Near SSD performance?

      In general, speeds of this range are going to be "peak" or sequential. Even then, the alleged performance advantages of SSD may or may not help you. It's simply not something that you can assume as an article of faith.

      ANY decent sized SSD is going to be costly. Doesn't matter if it is "decent" or not.

      Peak burst rates for a spinny disk is going to be very much like SSD because you're going to be reading from memory just like an SSD does.

      1. Steve Todd
        Stop

        Re: Near SSD performance?

        With a hard disk the peak speed equates to how fast data that is already in the cache can be sent to the host. As the cache in this case is 8MB it will take slightly more than 1/40th of a second to read all the data in it. At this point the speed at which you can transfer data off of the platter becomes important, and that's typically 1/3rd of the speed of cached data. A sequential read of the entire disk will likely average below 100MB/sec, an SSD will average close to the 550MB/sec number.

    2. Tom Stephenson

      Re: Near SSD performance?

      No way will a 5400 RPM drive deliver 300MB/Sec. Not even in sequential read.

      Think 150MB/Sec sequential read and you will be in the right ball park.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One typo in the specs given here:

    The WD Scorpio Blue 500 GB ( WD5000LPVT) disk only supports 400G Operating Shock, not 4000G!

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