Posts Tagged ‘hard drives’

Western Digital to Release 20,000RPM Hard Drive

With solid state disks on the horizon, Western Digital has been rumored to release a 20,000RPM hard drive. The news came from bet-tech.net that Western Digital is making the drive as a response to pressure to start converting to solid state disks. Currently, the biggest bottleneck in computer systems seems to be I/O speed. We have processors with 4 cores, we tote notebooks with 4GB of memory, we have 80GB iPods for storing music and yet we’re still running on the same speed disks as years ago. Storage capacity in drives has seemed to become a non-issue for a lot of new systems. On Newegg.com right now, there are Western Digital drives with a capacity of 1TB for a trivial $159. RAIDs can improve the read speeds, capacity, and reliability of storage systems, but drives still remain somewhat slow. These drives will be expensive, no doubt, but hopefully a vast improvement on their 10,000 and 15,000RPM predecessors. Bit-tech has also reported that sources at Western Digital have said that a priority on the drive is also noise, which I imagine would become a problem with a disk spinning that fast. They plan on releasing the drive as a 2.5″ form factor and creating a 3.5″ housing to allow it to fit into larger bays. Solid state disks are definitely coming and definitely here to stay, however they’re not here yet. Cost and capacity are currently the two biggest concerns, as well as some technical concerns of the drives over conventional hard disk drives.

I haven’t seen a projected release date, however it better come fast as solid state disks are on their way.

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Filed under News : Comments (1) : Aug 18th, 2008