I'd have one of these in an instant. I have one of the older ones and it is still like shit off a shovel - one of the best upgrades I ever made.
WD lets loose ferocious 1TB VelociRaptor
WD has boosted the capacity of its 10K VelociRaptor disk drive, jumping to a 1TB capacity from the current 600GB. Otherwise it's the mixture as before: 10,000rpm and a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, but with a cache doubled to 64MB. There is the same IcePack 3.5-inch mounting frame/heat sink. The capacity points are 250GB, 500GB and …
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 19:13 GMT Ilgaz
Plain lie
Momentus keeps statistics of most read accessed sectors and decides to put them in nand. It has nothing to do with writes, it can't make a stupid decision like "lets keep writing to nand instead of magnetic". It MAY decide "lets put this constantly accessed video effect dll sectors in flash so it will be read faster".
Don't they have any clue about their rivals product or are they playing ignorant?
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 20:02 GMT Danny 14
Re: Too late.
Even a super super conservative 30W difference means that at a whopping 12p per kwh (based on 8760 hours per year) you would save an enormous £32 a year. I'd imagine you'd need 4 SSDs to make up for one of these raptors so you should break even in about 15 years.
that being said, with 4 SSDs your power consumption would be worse off so no you're talking shite afterall.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 21:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Too late.
Thanks for noticing that.
As it happens it's even better than that. Because I did it side by side, all scientific like, with another box. On a relatively simple build, dev, test cycle, my compatriot sat around for over half an hour a day waiting on deployment, and I didn't.
So that means on say a relatively modest £400 quid a day for an employee, you're making £25+ a day on the deal. This buys the hard drives outright in under two months, from which point you're saving 125 quid a week in employment costs. So 11 months minus holidays, at 125 quid a week, is 40 * 125 == 5K a year net savings.
The costs are not just the price, as I'm sure Mr ChriZ has worked out.
In investment banks, simply SSDing all their dev hardware would get their front office bugs fixed hours earlier.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 20:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Too late.
I said pays the interest on the difference. That's all it needs to do, as all the drives are effectively worthless, due to technology advancements five years from now. Inflation has made the capital difference pointless too.
As it happens it saves far more than 30 Watts, because I can shut down most of the hardware for long periods of time, due to lack of boot time. The CPU isn't sitting there waiting for the disk.
It's the same argument as not buying double glazing. The extra heating costs don't justify the loan to pay for it.
Two Kingston 480GB disks are 1 grand. from Amazon. Even if your drive is free, the interest on my two drives, at 3.5% is only 35 quid. Bearing in mind what I'd get for putting my grand in a bank, which is less than half a percent, then is it worth it? I think not.
10K Rpm raptor versus two Kingston SSDs, striped. Well, I'm afraid it's game over for rotating.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 10:16 GMT Dave 126
Re: Too late.
@Danny 14
Good on you for throwing some numbers at the problem. Always a good exercise, and can always be refined afterwards:
It might be the PC we are considering spends much of its time transferring files. When this job is completed, the entire PC will shut down, saving the energy that is consumed by the rest of the system components. The power consumption of the SSDs versus that of the HDDs isn't the only consideration, is all.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 21:39 GMT Fuzz
Re: Momentus
you do realise that most servers these days are using 2.5" drives? The smaller drives generally have faster access times because the heads move less distance. The only reason for using larger drives is capacity, if the 2.5" drive provides the capacity you need then there's no reason to use it in your workstation.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 08:14 GMT Arrrggghh-otron
Re: Momentus
It took me a while to be comfortable with the idea of 2.5" hard drives in servers.
I think that was down to seeing lots and lots of failed 2.5" drives over the years, as they were mainly used in laptops that were kicked about a bit before being presented for repair.
Having had servers running happily on 2.5" drives for a couple of years now (I'm not going to talk about how reliable they are as that is just tempting fate) I would be happy to run a 2.5" HD in anything.
That said, my aging desktop still boots of a raid 0 pair of 36GB first generation Raptors and is still pretty quick. I would ditch the raptors for SSD if they would die, but they won't. They are solidly built and seriously reliable.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 12:57 GMT Captain Scarlet
Re: Momentus
Me to, as I am lazy I want one big drive for a decent price for everything rather than several.
I am aware it won't be as fast as ssd for booting but I don't want to pay for a laptop drive that doesn't have as much space (My HD duplicator also requires the new drive be the same size or bigger).
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 21:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Survivability
I've built (read: cobbled together) a few machines with the older generation of this drive. SSD was too expensive then, it is still expensive now.
One advantage of the spinning medium is survivability. In case it crashes, data on SSD's are notoriously hard to recollect. On hard drives the task is possible.
(I do my backup thank you. But you never know)
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 15:18 GMT Nigel 11
Re: Survivability
A SSD is more likely to survive being dropped - especially being dropped while active! A SSD may be more likely to turn into a brick without warning. Ordinary HDs often degrade slowly, and you can see the developing need to replace them by monitoring the SMART info (especially Reallocations). This is especially true is they are running continuously in a server, rather than being banged around in a laptop. Often it's also possible to recover almost all the data using a tool like ddrescue that retries intelligently.
But never neglect your backups. Some hard drives do turn into bricks without warning. About a third of the failures, if I remember Google's statistics right. My gut feeling is that it's a lower percentage today.
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Tuesday 17th April 2012 22:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
ssd v spinny discs ???
why all this row over SSDs V spinning discs ? SSDs are quicker, Spinny discs have more GB / unit-of-money.
I've got both in my machine . 60 GB of SSD to dual boot Linux and, if I may swear, occassionally WinXP . 2TB spinny disc for all my pictures n data other stuff . Works for me.
Oh and I had an older velociraptor , it was quick before it broke.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 05:55 GMT Christian Berger
I still don't get it
I mean harddisks, particulary such small ones, are only used on initial program load. After that you'll have all the code you need in RAM.
Hybrid disks seem like the old "RAM-disk cards" people had in the past, where you had an ISA-card with, perhaps a megabyte of RAM you couldn't use directly, but only as a disk. Or the harddisk controllers with built-in cache RAM. Those all died out when we moved to 386s with a 32 Bit address space, giving "unlimited" amounts of RAM.
Now we have 64 Bit address spaces. It's fairly cheap to have 16 gigs of RAM now.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 08:54 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: I still don't get it
"I mean harddisks, particulary such small ones, are only used on initial program load. After that you'll have all the code you need in RAM... It's fairly cheap to have 16 gigs of RAM now."
And what about that first load? Or cold boot? Or if you have more than 16GB of data you wish to deal with quickly.
IIRC it's about £60 for 16GB RAM. Yes, this is pretty cheap, but for around that you could get a 60GB SSD, allowing your OS & at least most programmes to be kept on it, improving both boot and initial programme load times.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 10:27 GMT Dave 126
Re: I still don't get it
I was looking into the same sort of issues, when trying to work out whether to use 'Readyboost'... most of the time I'm using less than half my RAM (4GB total) and a 7,200 HDD so figured I didn't need a crutch designed for Vista-era machines. I should suck-it-and-see though: Test, don't guess.
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 15:12 GMT TeeCee
Re: I still don't get it
Having a Velociraptor, a Win 7 machine with plenty of RAM and a spare, fast 8Gb memory stick, I have already tried this.
The answer is it makes absolutely bugger all difference, bar adding another flashing light to the box.
I reckon you probably need a USB3 stick and port to see any advantage that isn't chewed up by the overhead of running ReadyBoost in the first place when the spinning HDD is already fast.
Now, there were rumours when Win 7 was in gestation that it would provide the ability to tie an HDD and a small SSD together, to provide something like a DIY Momentus XT without the size limitations. Shame it never turned up. That'd be interesting, if only to see the interminable flame wars over the best SSD to HDD ratio this would undoubtably cause......
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 11:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Noise? Heat?
Not that hdds make the racket that they once did, but the fans keeping the whole system cool can make up for that if they produce a heap of heat.
I try to keep the noise levels minimum (silent would be nice, but I can't achieve it, especially at tropical 30C ambient) a the machine is a home/general/music machine. Would this disk fit in that scenario?
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Wednesday 18th April 2012 11:56 GMT Dave Robinson
Re: Noise? Heat?
Velociraptors, being 10K rpm, have a more pleasant (ie. less noticable) seeking noise. Also, they use less electricity than even the green 3.5" drives.
I have a system with a 60GB SSD, a 600GB Velociraptor, a cheap Scythe cooler on an Intel i5, and an unbelievably cheap (and quiet) eBuyer-special PSU. It sits under my desk at home, and is inaudible even when the house is completely silent.
I keep all the "bulk" data and applications I rarely use on the Velociraptor, because I don't trust SSDs (yet), and couldn't afford a big enough one!
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