14 Jul
2004
14 Jul
'04
6:48 a.m.
Apparently, 15,000 rpm drives (high end fibre channel
drives) have
lower capacity than slower drives not just because the areal density
is less, but also because the platter is smaller. You're getting what
is effectively a 2.5 inch drive packaged into a 3.5 inch chassis. The
reason the platter is that small is that you can't spin a 3.5 inch
sized platter at 15k rpm with acceptable motor power.
We ship plenty of FC drives at work - the "lower capacity" here
means (typically) 130GB instead of 250GB. They cost more too!
All this means that the modern way to large capacity
is to combine
lots of (physically) small drives -- in other words, RAID. That also
gives you fault tolerance, and increased performance by putting more
heads to work.
RAID is certainly the way to go. I'm sort of tempted to
try it out on my home system sometime but there's always
been something else to do first!
Antonio
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org