back to article WD bigshots spin superfast disk roadmap

Western Digital's disk drive roadmap has hybrids and tech transitions coming to shrink I/O latency and regain fast areal density growth. At an exec summit in Vienna on 8 May, WD discussed coming hard disk drive (HDD) technologies without pre-announcing products and with some unattributable thoughts around hybrid flash and hard …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. El Presidente
    Mushroom

    Are you listening HDD manufacturers ?

    You can all shove your new fangled tech up yer hoops, ok ?

    We're not interested.

    The so called crisis is OVER and you all managed to post MASSIVE profits.

    BRING DOWN THE PRICES OF DRIVES AND STOP GOUGING THE MARKET.

    There. I've said it and I feel much better.

    1. El Presidente
      Thumb Up

      Re: Are you listening HDD manufacturers ?

      Specifically, I'd be extremely grateful if you could show some contrition and offer a 'buy two get one free' deal on 4TB drives. Put me down for at least six, probably nine, as and when you stop gouging the market.

  2. JaimieV
    Holmes

    Dodgy fixative on numbers

    Looks like the 0 from "7 per cent of all the shipped petabytes were HDDs" has slipped down to land "in a 5000GB drive".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    fixative fixed

    I agree it looks like it should be "70 per cent of all the shipped petabytes were HDDs" but 25GB of flash may well be enough for 95% hit rate on 5,000 GB (5TB) compared to the measly MBs used in drive RAM caches today.

  4. fnj

    Math fail

    "20-24GB flash cache in a 5000GB drive ... is approximately a 20:1 HDD to flash ratio."

    Come on now. In my universe, 5000/20 = 250 HDD to flash ratio.

  5. Luke McCarthy

    Bang Bang

    Maxwell's silver HAMR came down upon her write head

  6. James Pickett

    Is flash what you need for cacheing? I thought it was cycle-limited...

    1. YARR
      Thumb Up

      Agreed...

      I agree with your observation. However I don't think the intention is for everything to go via the flash cache, like a processor-memory cache would. Instead, some intelligent algorithm in the drive will only cache data that is read often but not written so often, such as the start up files of the OS, rather than the swap partition.

  7. SamM-IDRC
    Pint

    Twice as nice

    Get double the performance with TWO drives as standard on Laptops and PC's. Tune the OS to prioritize foreground processes better based on disk bottlenecks as well as the CPU's. Multi-core, so why not multi-HDD? Couple of 2.5 or 1.8 VS a 3.5?

    1. DRendar
      FAIL

      Re: Twice as nice

      Um.

      Yeah, that's called RAID 0, and has been around for a bloody donkey's year.

      The problem is that by using 2 drives, you are effectively doubling your chances of suffering a HDD failure, because if you lose one drive, you lose all data on the array.

      I suppose what you're proposing is a self-contained RAID0 array in a 3.5" / 2.5" package, which is interesting, but would cost much more than double the cost of the original drive with worse than half the reliability, plus you'd be relying upon 1.8" or micro-drives for your storage, which aren't particularly fast or capacious in the first place.

      If speed was that important to you, then you'd be using flash, or if you need speed and capacity, you'd use your own RAID array of either HDD's or flash drives.

      So, nice idea, but it fails the reality check.

      Dash

  8. Tony Rogerson

    Its not space is IOPS (Databases anyway!)

    In the database space IOPs is key; to get IOPs I physically need many many more hard drives than I need SSD for decent semi-random IO at a decent latency (< 5ms).

    So, for my 1TB database I only need to buy a 1TB PCIe card, to get the same level of IOPS from hard disks I'd need dozens.

    So, comparing storage shipped between SSD and Hard drives is just wrong, it should be a mix.

    T

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like