So what exactly does that mean?... the higher the RPM an HD has.... [finish sentence here please].

The faster it can read/write data.

Same with a car.
If the tires on your car are rotating faster, you get to where you want faster.

ok my entire office desk just got sticky, really sticky.

omega-=> In really simple terms, all your games and porn are stored on these electromagnetic discs, called platters. They are spun at the xxxx RPM speed on a spindle, (similar to a how CD..or actually, a old-style music record is spun) and the EM radiation is read and translated into your bits and bytes and what-not.

Wow, tahts fast... 20k RPM? But what is the thing used for?

The usual hard drive stuff. When it first comes out, it'll be expensive, so it'll probably be attractive to gamers who want killer rigs or working-folk who need their data pumped quick. But eventually, with time, 20,000 RPM drives potentially could be become the norm, like 7200RPM drives are now.

Too bad it is a WD.

I don't know why 10K drives aren't the norm now.

I wonder, can you even load stuff into RAM fast enough to keep up with this 20K HDD?

iamjoe - What's wrong with WD? =O

kspiess - Great simplifying of how a hard drive works. MUCH easier to understand than what Bill Gates said (Note sarcasm incase it somehow didn't seem present in the sentence)

Also faster HD's = win cakes. How much could it read/write per second at that speed?

I wonder if this will really be useful in the longrun, when SSD (Solid State Drives) are gaining in capacity and read/write speeds. If 10k RPM isn't the norm will 20k every make it to the consumer level norm before SSD's break the magic price per GB barrier?

@billgates3: The bottle neck model for a comptuer goes as such: CPU is 1000x faster then your RAM, RAM is much faster then your HDD. Whilst an HDD at 20K could easily read a few hundred megabytes a second, even old school DDR can offput Gigabytes in a second, soo the HDD still has a LONG way ot catch up, and with today RAM modules urnning at 1.3 GHz, well you get the idea. SSDs so far are teh only thing CLOSE to those speeds, but are still limited to 3G/B a secodn due ot SATAII limitiations. SATA3 is in the works and is promising a huge ammount of bandwidth(look for sources on google), possibly enough to keep up with DDR2 800.

I actually saw newegg selling a hard drive similar to the one in the picture. The one in the picture, at least on newegg, is a 2.5" drive, surrounded by a heatsink that lets it fit in a 3.5" drive bay. It wont fit in laptops because they have different connectors.

I have an older 74gb Raptor drive, and its the noisest hard drive I've heard, so hopefully these will be as quiet as they say. I can only imagine what they will be like in a RAID0

I do agree with Redemption though, with SSD technology increasing, I doubt 20k drives will catch on. If some is serious about hard drive speed, they can probably get a 128gb SSD for about the same price as a 20k drive when they come out.

@DeathMonkey

WD has the Highest failure rate of any HD manufacturer, that's what's wrong.

Soon, motherboards will have a standard 1cmx1cm "hdd" aka BIG ram that is about 1petabye.

Which means, HDD space will never be an issue.

I wasn't aware of that, my Western Digital hard drive is working well though.

I guess a few outlast the pre programmed fail point, but yes, WD has major failure issues. like 30% or somethin'.

Pre-programmed fail point?

You mean, the HDD has an expiration date?

Sorry, it's July 1st 2009, your HDD will expire in 1 day.

LOL

With WD, that is pretty close. lol.

iamjoe56- granted from all reviews of their latest offerings it is obvious quality control has definately gone down throughout the years, however, I have used WD products for quite some time and have a 6GB drive that has lasted for over 12 years with only 3 problem sectors. I recently purchased a 500GB SATAII WD drive retail version for $89, I mistakenly used the software that came with it to format the drive and ended up killing my machine for a week!the tools have a tendency to change up how they want to operate, the first time I formatted it the drives were set up exact opposite f how it was told. So second go round I told it the opposite hoping to get it done like I wanted and it decided to do as it was told. I was preparing for a vacation so I wasnot in a hurry to fix it. I left the computer up and running crucnching data for SETI while I was gone, when I got home all was well. I waited until the next morning to report my findings and throught the night there was a power failure, the software had changed the drive letter and the boot sector of my existing drive and the new Harddisk was not ready for this and failed as well. Before it was over I was getting black screen of death errors telling me the mobo was bad (it wasn't BTW) but I managed to use a floppy drive I borrowed from another computer (my usb port mysteriously failed to work at this point) and copied a few files off of another computer and used it to boot off of XP Pro CD with no service packs. Needless to say I had been a huge fan of WD drives, this latest incident has caused me to rethink this. While I still like their products the included software is NOT worth anything. I probably should have just gone ahead and got the OEM version anyway...But the price I paid for it was about the same, a day or two later newegg dropped their price on the OEM by at least $5.

SSD drives are better than HDDs at most things, but not everything. I think combo SSD/HDDs will be the intermediate step forward. SSD storage for operating systems and games, HDD storage for cache and media files.

I have 7 western digital hard drives running in my house, all of them working fine. The only time I had a problem with one was when I had it laying on my desk powered up and it shorted out. After about $5 in shipping, I got a new one.

Western digital wouldnt be the second best hard drive manufacture if it had a high failure rate.

kspiess, how would a combo SSD/HDD even work? It seems like you would have to pack in about 20gb of flash memory along with the hard drive platters, and there dosnt seem to be enough room in some drives for that. And what is a HDD better at then a SDD?

Hey Slayer. Well platter densities of HDD's are ever shrinking. Judging from current HDDs for notebooks, I don't think size would be an issue in say, a year. Or what if this just made the drive of size to take up a 5 1/4" bay? No prob's.

Currently one edge that HDD's have over SSD's is for life-span. For constant/excessive reading and rewriting, you are going to wear out a SSD far, far faster than you would a HDD. SSD's are only good for xxxxxx numbers of read/writes, where as HDDs are good for xxxxxxxx numbers of read/writers. So for Window's temp/paging files, you would wear out a SDD fairly quickly... a HDD would be better suited.

Also it will still be a long ways yet before the SDD price-per-gig comes close to the HDD price-per-gig. So I'm guessing a combo drive would be a good intermediate step...but to back track a bit , probably more likely in the sense that people will use both separate drives in their system, and not actual physical combo drives (just because I could see many consumers being perplexed by partitioning and figuring out the best way to use it...)

On another matter..I've used many Western Digital drives over the years, and never had a single drive failure myself.

@kspiess, the idea of a combo drive isn't bad. SDD's are faster, resistant to physical abuse, and draw less power, but HDD's have many times the storage capacity for the dollar.

But even apart from issues with how a combo drive would work (would they get two separate drive letters? What kind of stuff should go in which drive?) I think the real trend is away from local storage altogether. With ubiquitous WiFi and eventually 3G, you could store everything in the cloud. The local computer needs only an OS and a browser, and Bob's your uncle. If you have an HDD, you could rent out the storage space to somebody like Amazon or Google. But otherwise, an SDD has plenty of space.

Those flash chips do wear out, but when they do, get a new SDD or even a new computer. I expect web computers to become so cheap, they are nearly disposable.