Western Digital to launch consumer 10K RPM drives

WHEN 7200 RPM hard drives first appeared on the market, many people wondered when 10k RPM drives would appear.

The first 7200 RPM drives from Seagate were quite noisy, and heat was a big issue as always. Initial gains in the transition from 5400 RPM were not as high as expected. Nevertheless there was speculation that 10k consumer drives would appear within several years because all of the large companies were already using 10k SCSI drives and Seagate's 15k RPM Cheetah's were already in sight.

Of course today anybody that is knowledgeable chooses 7200 RPM drives if they can. The cost difference is negligible, performance gains have solidified, and reliability problems have for the most part been quelled. But consumer level 10k drives have still not appeared 5 years later.

Part of the problem has been that most consumers don't really see the need for 10k drives. Density increases have led to quick and easy performance gains, and large caches help to delivery frequently used data quickly.

Most consumers buy computers based on CPU GHz. They do not realize that the hard drive is the slowest part of the computer. Almost every other access time is measured in nanoseconds, such as caches and memory, but hard drives still access data in milliseconds. They are the weakest link in the chain, and even a minor increase can lead to huge performance increases.

Western Digital has recently been very quick innovate and develop new products, in particular high density platter drives and large cache products. They were the first with 180GB drives consisting of 60GB platters, and the first with 8MB cache for consumer ATA drives. This is exemplified by their Special Edition drives which are among the best in the world.

Now, our friends at Xbit Labs are stating that Western Digital will launch 10k RPM desktop drives on February 11th. The new line of WD's HDDs will offer an 8MB buffer, Serial ATA-150 interface and fluid dynamic bearing motors spinning at 10k. It was not stated whether the Serial ATA interface is native or not, which makes a big difference.

They said: "With the announcement next Tuesday WD will strengthen its market positions by continuing to bring technologies previously found in servers destined products to consumers data storage market".

According to a Japanese web-site, WD plans to offer a 5 year limited warranty on the HDD with MTBF of 1.2 million hours. The expected cost was not stated. µ

See Also
Seagate unveils its own HAMR
Maxtor slashes warranties to one year from three
Hard drive makers soft pedal S-ATA cycle
Maxtor messes up on S-ATA, ATA drives
IBM to close Hungarian hard drive plant