With everyone talking at SSD drives as the future of hard drives, those old platter based drives aren't looking too attractive anymore. But that doesn't mean they're going down without a fight, oh no. Western Digital has announced that its hard at work on an insane 20,000 rpm hard drive. That's nearly twice as fast as the fastest hard drive that most people would ever buy for their computers.
And they're going to make it practical as well, ensuring that it'll run quietly. 10,000 rpm drives right now run like jet engines, so we can't imagine them selling a 20,000 rpm drive without some fancy technology to get it quiet. But hey, if Western Digital says they'll be silent and they actually are they might have something good on their hands.
Bit Tech, via CrunchGear
editor@dvice.com
By CJW at 4:33 PM ON 06/06/08
I've got an older 32GB 10k Raptor from Western Digital and it doesn't seem to be any louder than my other drives. It certainly makes things faster though.
I love how huge the heatsink is for this thing too. I don't know anything about thermal dynamics, but the big chunky fins seem a little inefficient.
I wonder how this will compare to an SSD by the time it becomes available.