Posters Name: Kagato
Posters Email: kagato@mwgl.org
Subject: 10k RPM SATA Drives?
News:
Looks as though the folks at Western Digital are really wanting to push the SATA drive market forward. StorageReview.com has posted a new review of Western Digital's upcoming Raptor line, those being a new line of 10k RPM SATA drives.
WD believes 10k RPM ATA's time has come. According to WD, the key factor holding back higher spindle speeds was parallel ATA's lack of specification-level hot swap functionality. To be successful (initially, at least), any 10k RPM ATA drive must gun for the enterprise market. And in the enterprise, a sector that views outages as unacceptable, the ability to swap out a failed drive for another unit with minimal downtime is crucial. Serial ATA provides for such hot-swap functionality. Now that SATA is trickling into the channel, WD believes 10k RPM ATA's time has come.Looks to be rather impressive results, even though the drive is still only a beta (i.e. firmware has a ways to go). The drive belts out some great scores and it comes close to matching performace with a couple of Ultra320 SCSI drives. Perhaps I'll finally have a reason to stop purchasing SCSI drives.