Seagate drops new summer spinners, bares 'quiet', 'fast' models Seagate is slinging two new spinners our way just in time for summer: a large one and a small one. The larger model is another variation on Seagate's 3.5-in 4TB technology: the Terascale. This is a 4-platter drive with 625Gbit/in2 areal density, spinning at 5,900 rpm, a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, 64MB cache, and a 160MB/sec …
"Neither WD, nor its subsidiary HGST, nor Toshiba, have 4TB drives spinning in the 5.900rpm area in their product ranges."Isn't there a 4TB WD Red? Those crawl in the 5900rpm range as I can attest. Am currently swapping a NAS to use them and the re-build time is horrific. Intellispeed really means "Stoopidslow" :(
A WD "expert" on the Red desk told me that "intellipower" means that the speed of the drives is "between 5k and 7k", however, the ones I've got are always at the same speed - you can tell by the pitch that they sing as. They never seem to speed up or slow down. The expert also linked a page saying that intellipower drives were very fast because they had cache memory. Who knows what we would do without all these innovations from WD :-/
I suspect that the speed range just allows them to ship a whole load of different drives without having to update the specs. Also bare in mind that the Reds are basically Greens but with firmware that supports the drive not dripping it's SATA connection when it reads a bad sector. I'm just a bit pissed that at the time I couldn't buy any of the Hitatchi or Samsung 7k drives, and the only proper 7k NAS drives I could get from WD were SAS only and cost almost the same per disk as the NAS chassis.
If drives mainly fail through a head no longer working, or a limited bad patch on one disk, this idea makes a huge amount of sense. I suspect there is prior art on this though, so Seagate probably only has a short-term lock and no patent. This needs RAID controller code to work properly. too.
"Neither WD, nor its subsidiary HGST, nor Toshiba, have 4TB drives spinning in the 5.900rpm area in their product ranges."
HGST's has the 5K4000 model, which has better specs than Seagate's drive...
I have one here, it spins at 5,900 rpm and has 600,000 load cycles and 24/7 rating.
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