An interesting trend in hard drive design
A few years ago, I sprung for some 15,000 rpm SCSI drives to run my HP engineering workstation. That’s still a high water mark in terms of spindle speed. Even today, the most common speed for workaday drives seems to be 7200 rpm. So it was pretty interesting for me to notice that some mainstream hard drive vendors are actually slowing their drives down!
If you scout the various major hard drive manufacturers’ product lines, you will see some brand new drives being offered at 5400 rpm, or even at speeds that vary between 5400 and 7200 rpm. It’s almost as if things are getting slower instead of faster. Well, in a sense they are. These brand-new, slow-rpm drives have some very intriguing advantages, namely, they’re unusually quiet and they use comparatively little power. In fact, some of them are being marketed as “green” drives because they use less electricity to operate. Interestingly, performance doesn’t seem to suffer too much because of large cache buffers and high areal densities.
So, when it comes time to replace some of those server hard drives, it may be worth asking whether (depending on the role of the server and/or NAS device) you might be smart to install something a little slower, about the same performance level, and a lot better for the environment – not to mention your company’s electric bill.
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