> 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_at_iee.org
Received on Wed Jul 14 2004 - 13:48:16 BST