Have HDDs gotten any faster in the last decade?

Staples

Supreme [H]ardness
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I remember when the 10k RPM WD Raptors came out. I think I had each iteration of the series. Even though they all spun at 10k, each one was faster than the predecessor. Most HDDs now still spin at 5400/7200 RPM like they did 15 years ago but knowing what I know about the Raptors, that does not limit their speed.

So where are we now? Are today's WD Black (or any performance HDDs) faster in terms of seek times, sustained data read/write performance than they were 10 years ago?
 
Yes they are faster.

The 5400rpm WD white label drives im shucking from WD elements externals right now are faster(180-200MB/s read and write) than my 10 year old 2TB WD black 7200rpm drive(150-170MB/s read/write).
 
That is great news. SSDs are still not cheap enough for me to replace my storage HDDs. Can you link me to one of these drives?
 
That is great news. SSDs are still not cheap enough for me to replace my storage HDDs. Can you link me to one of these drives?


You don't need to replace your spinners entirely. Get a smaller SSD and put your operating system and bandwidth demanding programs on it, leave your spinners for storage.
 
Speaking of 10 year old drives, this one turned 10 years old just a couple of days ago.
this was my friends old project drive where he stored his completed jobs. replaced it with a 2TB SSD since he has been seeing a rise in clients asking for revisions and modifications to past projects and didn't like waiting for the projects to load up.
IMG_2689.JPG
 
You don't need to replace your spinners entirely. Get a smaller SSD and put your operating system and bandwidth demanding programs on it, leave your spinners for storage.
That is how my system is currently set up. In fact, I have two SSDs and two HDDs.
Two windows install on each SSD and a WD Black 640GB and another WD Black 1TB. Both are really old HDDs. In fact, the one TB drive is the same model as is pictured above. The 640GB is several years older. I have a lot of pictures stored on the HDDs.
 
The 6TB Ironwolfs I used for my primary NAS array push ~250MB/s each. That's not SSD speeds, but it's quick enough for mass storage; in a four-drive striped mirror (12TB raw space) I'm seeing ~750MB/s reads. That's almost enough to saturate my 10Gbit network ;).
 
This is like saying a Metro is faster than a Yugo. It may be correct, but that isn’t saying much.

Exactly. While they are faster, they are so far from SSD's that it doesn't matter. That said, you'll notice the difference between some WD green drive and something else with reasonable performance for applications. So HDD speed does matter, but they aren't a viable alternative to SSD's for anything that benefits from good disk performance.
 
This thread is somewhat pointless.
Of course HDDs are getting faster, but slowly.
Today's fastests HDDs can do 200-210MB/s when empty. My last WD Black 1TB could do 180MB/s when empty some 5 years back. My 10-14 years old 320 and 500GB Seagates could do 115MB/s. I guess the vertical/perpendicular recording method produced this breakthrough in speeds. After that I couldn't see any perceivable improvement.
Access time (latency) improves even slower, the limits of mechanical characteristics of head actuators couldn't allow for some perceptible improvement here.


Even todays SSDs are getting faster slowly. They even get slower fastly :p. With QLC at least. Some SLC and DRAM caches (there are already models with no DRAM) keep them adequate for short bursts but..
 
That is great news. SSDs are still not cheap enough for me to replace my storage HDDs. Can you link me to one of these drives?

https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Des...F8&qid=1549560522&sr=8-4&keywords=wd+elements

You don't need to replace your spinners entirely. Get a smaller SSD and put your operating system and bandwidth demanding programs on it, leave your spinners for storage.

Yeah exactly, my current system has 3 SSD's and 3 Spinners, i only use SSD's when i need the speed.
 
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Ohh. Now this is very ironic.
After more than 10 years of service. I woke up to the WD Black 640GB drive not working.
I will tinker with it to see if I can get it to work (good thing 95%+ stuff was backed up) but the timing of this is so hilarious.

Update: Judging from the acoustics, I'd say something was broken inside the drive. I can read the file table structure at best but not the files. Guess I am in the market for a new drive after all. I am aiming for a 2TB drive for storage. I only have 1TB cloud storage so I don't want myself to go wild. The external drive above looks good and the price is excellent for the space but is there any advantage over the internal WD Black?

WD640AAKS
Birrth date: 2008-06-01
Date of death: 2018-02-07

Guess it was ALMOST 10 years.
 

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Ohh. Now this is very ironic.
After more than 10 years of service. I woke up to the WD Black 640GB drive not working.
I will tinker with it to see if I can get it to work (good thing 95%+ stuff was backed up) but the timing of this is so hilarious.

Update: Judging from the acoustics, I'd say something was broken inside the drive. I can read the file table structure at best but not the files. Guess I am in the market for a new drive after all. I am aiming for a 2TB drive for storage. I only have 1TB cloud storage so I don't want myself to go wild. The external drive above looks good and the price is excellent for the space but is there any advantage over the internal WD Black?

WD640AAKS
Birrth date: 2008-06-01
Date of death: 2018-02-07

Guess it was ALMOST 10 years.
This is 2019, btw
 
I can certainly tell the difference between my WD Gold 10TB and older 5400-7200rpm drives I have..During backups it consistenly achieves about 220mb/s speeds.
 
2.5" 5400RPM drives are still agonizing but 3.5" flavors have more cache and areal density so are okay. I am utterly spoiled by SSDs however. It's a condition that only cowbell can cure.
 
Yeah I'll say they have gotten faster. I have 15 spinners on my media server, all 7200RPM SATA. The 220MB/s 8TB Ironwolf's vs. the agonizing slow 62MB/s 300GB DiamondMax 10's, remind me of that every day. :(
 
my 10 year old WD 1TB Greens average 60-70MB/s. It had not occurred to me that they were all running at SATA 2 (3gbps) until I picked up new drive in Nov and realized it ran at 200MB/s as a spindle drive...
Time to upgrade my 7 year old servers to the latest 6gbps...
 
my 10 year old WD 1TB Greens average 60-70MB/s. It had not occurred to me that they were all running at SATA 2 (3gbps) until I picked up new drive in Nov and realized it ran at 200MB/s as a spindle drive...
Time to upgrade my 7 year old servers to the latest 6gbps...

the SATA 2 was not a limitation as the spec is faster than 70MB/s. SATA2 can do 375MB/s.
 
I have two 160GB 10k WD Raptors that a friend gave me. I used one for a while and it seemed fine. But I eventually went to a 120GB SSD, 240GB SSD, and 1TB Spinner setup.

I'm sure that the Raptors were a great solution at their time. And I'm sure the price was pretty high.

Tech keeps on keepin' on.
 
I have two 160GB 10k WD Raptors that a friend gave me. I used one for a while and it seemed fine. But I eventually went to a 120GB SSD, 240GB SSD, and 1TB Spinner setup.

I'm sure that the Raptors were a great solution at their time. And I'm sure the price was pretty high.

Tech keeps on keepin' on.

did you have the ones with the clear window?
IMG_1123.JPG
 
I use HDDs primarily for data backup and network storage. None of my PC's have mechanical drives in them any more.
 
To Zepher:

No. But they both are 2.5 " drives fitted into heat-sinks that make the mounting 3.5 ".
 
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