Thanks, Joe. Believe it or not, one of the reasons my posts are mostly technical in nature is that I want to test my assumptions and my facts out in the open. My experience is that it is the most efficient way to shake out the funky data and wrong assumptions.
I think you make a good point about how essentially there is hype in practically all parts of the technology food chain. Everybody is guilty, by the way. The numbers I put out, for example, came from the Seagate web site.
By performance I should have referred to average latency times and sustained transfer rates and not extrapolated based on spin speeds:
A) Average latency time
By rotating at 10,000 RPM, the average latency time is reduced to
2.99 msec, nearly a 40 percent improvement over 7,200-RPM drives. Latency measures the amount of time necessary on average to rotate a platter to the point where the head is positioned at the beginning of the data stream that will be read. The Cheetah drive naturally provides a low latency rate due to its high spin rate.
seagate.com
B) Data transfer rate
i) First generation Cheetahs
The 10K RPM family's high-formatted data transfer rate of 11.3 to
16.8 Mbytes per second is unsurpassed in the industry....
ii) Second generation Cheetahs (announced today)
biz.yahoo.com
Sustained formatted data transfer rates over 21 Mbytes/sec
provide users with the fastest data throughput of any drive on the market today.
Your point about how silicon is a gating factor is also a good one. Here's a link to an article that provides a snapshot of the two competing schools of thought in this area:
Disk Drives -- Is CMOS or BICMOS the best way to achieve high data rates? -- Diskcon airs conflict on read-channel processes
techweb.com
All that said, my essential point is still intact: in order to improve the performance of a drive, spindle speeds and areal density are two of the most important factors. SEG has demonstrable leads in spindle speeds (10000 rpm in the enterprise and 7200 rpm in the desktop) and, if the information re: the 2.3 GB/platter MR head is correct, they will soon achieve temporary areal density leadership in certain sweet spots of the market - a direct contradiction of your past assertion that because of poor management, they will always lag the other players in density.
Again, thanks for taking the time to correct my mistakes.
Regards,
Gus |
