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  • DanNeely - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    I'm curious why the capacities are as low as they are when they're selling denser/thinner 2.5" drives at consumer speeds. Does the higher spindle speed need larger bit cells on the platters for accurate IO, or are they short-stroking the platters/using <2.5" platters to reduce seek latency?
  • peterfares - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    Right, what are the applications for these drives? Why wouldn't you just use a SSD?
  • ImSpartacus - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    Yeah, I'm still not sure why SSDs aren't better. Is it a lifespan issue?
  • wumpus - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link

    I'm assuming a tradition-bound boss in charge of purchases who doesn't believe SSD alone can do the job. Lifespan might be an issue, but only considering the cost of having an intern manually swap the drives and a sysadmin set them up (the replacement cost of a 900GB SSD in 3+ years won't be an issue).

    I imagine this is simply the "easy choice", it has been done and shown to work. Switching to SSD requires a bit of time while a professional seriously considers the issues, then whatever changes to the memory system might need to be made (expensive, and can presumably be put off for a few quarters).

    Don't underestimate the importance of pointing fingers in a corporate environment, the guy who buys spinning seagate enterprise drives that subsequently fail blames seagate. The guy who buys SSDs that subsequently fail gets blamed. Who do you think is leaving the next layoff?
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    No, that's not what he said.

    You'd use these instead of an SSD if they provide:
    - enough performance for a better TCO
    - provide better write endurance
    - some other reason you deem important
  • danielfranklin - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    Cost per GB is far lower when comparing to SSDs that can sustain these kind of work loads.
    More servers than not still use disks like this, though increasingly its moving towards SANs that use multiple levels of storage, Eg. DRAM>SSD>SAS>SATA
  • saharadusud - Tuesday, January 10, 2017 - link

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  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    Exactly that: the slower the platters are moving below the heads, the more time they've got for read/write operations. And the more precise they can be, i.e. handle higher data densities.
  • nunya112 - Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - link

    they need less platters as the weight becomes too much at 15,000 rpm
    same as an engine the higher the revs the lighter the moving parts need to be and shorter stroke (less rotating mass)
    same problem here
  • Concillian - Thursday, October 27, 2016 - link

    Platters are smaller diameter than in 2.5" laptop drives, yes. High data rate aerial density is more difficult than low data rate aerial density.
    These are also used in applications where, for whatever reason the supporting hardware and software requires 512byte native formatting, which eats about 15% more space in the formatting area compared to if it was a drive that would only be 4k native (which is pretty much every other type of drive at this point).
    This is a niche market product.

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