Irreverence

posted on 06 June 2008 14:33

Industry sources say Western Digital is working on a 20,000rpm 2.5-inch Raptor drive.

Apparently it will ship in the same 3.5-inch packaging as the VelociRaptor which will act as both a heatsink for cooling and provide a heavy and stiff frame to counter vibration and to help quieten the drive.

An aspect of this is to improve the drive's streaming I/O and latency as the head will get to tracks faster. This will help the drive better withstand solid state disk (SSD) competition but also give Western Digital an edge against its bigger rival and HDD industry leader Seagate.

Generally, increasing a drive's rotation speed involves a capacity cut as the leeway for head tracking is so much less. The VelociRaptor is a 10K rpm drive offering 300GB. If it were spun twice as fast then the capacity could drop to 100-150GB.

If, and it is a big if, there was another rev of perpendicular recording technology that would take the 10K VelociRaptor to 450GB then a 20K might offer around 200-250GB, perhaps more.

As drivers spin faster the central clamp size tends to increase to reduce platter vibration and that decreases the available platter surface. It may be that a 20K drive would need a larger clamp making the capacity/speed ratio less favourable.

An additional factor is that a 20K drive would need more electricity to spin it and that would be a disadvantage in today's energy-conscious times.

Western Digital and SSDs

A WD spokesperson said that WD was heavily involved with SanDisk in the early days and owns patents relating to SSD technology. It knows what it takes to build SSDs. WD considers that SSD technology is not something that is going to be brought to the market any time soon in any kind of volume.

However, should it happen the company doesn't rule anything out. 

^{[Chris Mellor.]}