Hello, I would like to know if there is plan for futur release of Bigger 7 mm HDD than 500 Go. I would hope for 1 To or 750 Go capacity in the nea

Have a magnetic disk and then read and write heads built on top of the disk area. Kind of like the design of a car wheel. Or like a circle with a dot in the middle and lines from the dot to the edge of the circle in every direction (theoretically). On those lines, will be all read and all write heads. One line is all read, next line is all write in theory. Or have marks on the line to read and another mark for write. So in the end, one theoretical line will hold all read and another line will hold all write. This way, no spot on the hard drive will be missed. One read head for every cylinder(a fixed point and the disk spins. That read head is dedicated to that spot on the hard drive as it spins-not sure if i am explaining it correctly). And the write head would be similar. There should be no moving parts except the magnetic disk inside. 

Combine the PermaRam drive and magnetic state disk together from my other two ideas. From my understanding of what I have read; The DIMM slots have fixed voltages/wattages? So a 4 GB RAM Stick would be very similar to what an 8 GB RAM stick would need for power. You should be able to use SODIMM size slots for RAM inside the 3.5 inch drives to maximize the space available for the RAM.

Have a magnetic hard disk and then have the same size of RAM to load everything off of the drive, all built into the hard drive so it looks like a regular 3.5 inch hard drive. It will read and write to the RAM of the drive but from RAM, it will write the file changes to the magnetic disk, not the file placements.

I recently need to return a under-warranty 2TB drive for replcement and surprise to find that I have to bring it all the way to Changi! I had returned Seagate drive and Hitachi drive before. They just required to drop off the drive and RMA at a downtown shop. Why don't WD consider user can drop off drive at a more convenient downtown location.

Ok, first post, here is an idea, might be tottaly stupid, but whatever.

I dont know how much a head (not the actuatror/arm) costs or how small it can be made, and I dont know how many tracks a 500/750gb hdd has, BUT what about heads as many as the tracks "mounted" in the "floor" and the "ceiling" of the hdd?

In a few words, a head for each track of the platter.

here is a qiuck pick

 

Lets just say that the platter has 28 tracks, and each head has a radius that "shadows" 3 thracks. Of course the center of each head (red) can read one track). So we place the first line of heads (the horrizontal) to read the tracks 1,4,7,10 etc. To cover the missing tracks shift right by a track a duplicate line of heads (remove last head) and rotate them from the center of the platter as little as possible to gain more space. Here the second line of heads are 15 deg rotated. We do the same for the 3rd line.

 

Its a very simple idea and a very simple paradigm. It shows each heads possition in the floor/ceiling, but I dont know if its possible that the whole floor/ceiling is made from common head parts in order to reduse the spacing of the readers/writters.

 

Hope you understand the idea of mine. As you can see now there is a head for each track. With this we might be able to know about the usage of any track, like how much free sectors it has,

Any thoughts for this are welcome!

 

Edit: If its possible, that means no moving parts= no wear= no heat, parallel read/write = top speed, smaller in height hdds= more disks in RAID.

I may be outside the box on this one maybe too much, but is it possible to design a hard drive with "No moving parts".  Kinda like the same way RAM is used, and simply call it HDD RAM. Because if we all take a look on how RAM is being written to and read. Why not design a hard drive no other company can call their own? This would be a revelation to futuristic technology. Again, this is just an idea.

 

Thank you

Mark

 

My Western Digital has reached 106000 load/unload cycles in just 3 months of lifecycle. Considering the maximum lifecycle of the hard drive is 600000 load/unload cycles according to the product's data sheet the full lifecycle of the device is expected to be only 20 months which considering the price of the drive seems pretty weak. As an end-user I would like to be able to choose which APM value is the right for me and my performance requirements. Also my wdidle value was set 3.0 seconds by default anyway changing or disabling it had no impact on the increase rate of the load/unload cycles.

From this day on, I will only buy a hard drive if I already have the ability to reload or upgrade the firmware.  Without this option, if the firmware getts borked your drive is permanently toast.

 

I vote with my dollars, and I only vote for the success of companies that offer the ability to replace firmware located in mutable (erasable) storage!

Here is an idea that is certainly worth a bit. Maybe somebody will remember me & send me a check when it makes you loads of dough.

 

Hopefully, someone will be able to take this to the SMART or ACPI committee(s), or just introduce the feature and see it take off.

 

Why does "powersave" have to be binary? Consider technologies like Intel's SpeedStep(TM) for their CPUs. Or consider the idea behind the Dr. Pepper Ten(TM) soft-drink. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.

 

Today, we are faced with the following with HDDs:
* ON: full-speed, good performance; high heat & energy expenditure
* POWERSAVE: spun down, usually to a stop; wait several seconds before available on resume; mechanical aging due to overcoming inertia of stopped platters.

 

Why not have a state (call it IDLE), characterized by the following:
* Low-RPM maintenance...maybe 500RPM.
* R/W still must wait to spin up to operational speed
* spin-up times should be drastically reduced (less rotational inertia to overcome...still have some angular momentum)
* wear-and-tear on mechanics minimized (less stiction, less inertia, less torque, lower heat)
* significant power-savings versus full-on
* significant reduction in system heat & noise while IDLE

 

For desktop & server systems, this would be heaven-sent! Particularly for servers that are infrequently used, but require fast response.

 

This would also help close the power / performance gap with SSDs while maintaining your price advantage.

How can I fix the problem where my 64-bit chip digital signature is verify with my hard drive?

I bought a Black to use in my music studio - I bought it for performance to install in a custom built quiet PC (Fractal Design R3 case). My PC was completely silent until I started using the Black.  I researched forums to find out that those who bought their Blacks a year or so ago were fortunate enough to be able to enable AAM and reduce the noise to a satisfactory level without affecting performance too much - but the one I bought was recently manufactured and has been "locked" into performance mode at the factory.

 

Dear WD, I was a customer that had left you for Seagate years ago and had decided to come back and try out your product. I am VERY dissappointed that you have not yet taken action to release a firmware update that will re-enable AAM. The noise issue is getting lots of negative attention to WD on Newegg. You guys should really fix it.

 

Personally, if its resolved with a firmware update, I'll be buying again from WD. Otherwise, Im going back to Seagate.

Got a 1.5 TB WD Green Caviar drive and i would be able to dowlload the WD align tool but each time i hit the download button it bring me to my account setting ??????

 

Is WD fooling people ?

 

I will go to Seagate next time. At least they don't theat their customers as **bleep**-holes as WD is doing.

 

PS i know my english **bleep**!

 

 

Hello I have an idea for laptop hard drives

 

How about have much larger Capacity hard drives(i.e 2tb) and higher Rpms(i.e 7200rpm)

 

1. higher rpm the faster the hard hard drives is

2. much more performance

3. etc

Hi all,

 

I have two WDC WD10EALS (Caviar Blue 1TB) disks, but when I start WD Data LifeGuard diagnostics the SMART status is Not Available. I'm running 32 bit Win 7 OS. Any ideas?

when is WD going to have a 1TB per plater drives like Seagate - I like WD better with off plater head parking - i bought a 2Tb Seagate with 1Tb per plater and it is faster than my WD 600MB scorpio drive - WD is falling behind - I don't like Seagate HD but I wanted to see if the 1TB per plater had a higher transfer rate and it does but made in China and only 2 year warranty -  come on guys get HOT - PS you guys are getting like Seagate on listing specs - they put very little down and now you guys are doing the same - shame of WD

Hello,

Yesterday I was unzipping about 300MB of Javadocs to my HDD. I noted that it unzipped at about 30-40MB/sec for the first two seconds, then dropped down to 4-5MB/sec. Out of interest I then unzipped the same files to my SSD. It unzipped at a constant 30-40MB/sec. (probably CPU limited)

What I was seeing was probably the effect of write caching to the drive's 64MB cache. If I pause the unzipping I still hear my HDD chattering away - but then if I resume unzipping after the chattering stops, it again unzips at about 30-40MB/sec (for 2 seconds), confirming my suspicions.

 

I like this caching. Lots of gamers would too. Every once and a while coders do silly things like dump 120MB debug files to the HDD in a single frame, causing massive lag. A few TF2 updates resulted in 1-3 second jolts for laptop users, but on my 64MB cache drive the jolts were only a fraction of a second. I think even larger caches would eliminate a lot of the stutters that HDD users face when gaming, and would have a very positive effect on how fast a drive feels.

 

A while back I experimented with RAM caching, using trials of products like SuperCache and FancyCache. Unfortunately I had to discontinue their use - RAM caching plays havoc if you suffer a BSOD... And that is where drive-level caching matters. If my OS crashes, then my HDD still happily chatters away, completing its tasks.

I suppose my question is, does WD plan to release any drives with large amounts of cache? I mean 512MB+; If it only increases the price by $20-60, people will buy it.  I feel there's a market here... comprised of gamers. (and perhaps power users that own UPS's)

Obviously optimal use of larger amounts of cache is not as easy as flipping a figurative switch. But if WD was able to incorporate similar write-combining logic to what FancyCache and SuperCache have implemented, it would vastly speed up many tasks. Some tasks involve writing to the same location multiple times, or writing many smaller chunks serially - these could all be completed instantly (as far as the OS is concerned) and then combined into larger sequential writes to the platter surface. Current drives already do this to some degree, but with a much larger cache it could be taken much further, and benefit quite a few more advanced tasks.  It's got to have a very positive effect on performance.

It'd also be nice if such a drive prioritized reads over writes, as that would virtually eliminate stutters in games (and reduce usefulness in enterprise scenarios Can't cut in on that market, can we?    ) Going back to that poorly coded game and 120MB debug file - the drive absorbs it and continues on, and thanks to read prioritization it does not get jammed up if the game requires reading a texture or model the very next frame. Who needs an SSD when you can get a 2TB drive with very few of a regular HDD's weaknesses?

More cache could be very fun for us power users... depending on what the drive's firmware is coded to do. I wonder if Western Digital has considered boot preloading like the Momentus XT has? If a hard drive recorded which blocks are needed during booting, it could preload many of them to that nice big 512MB cache before your OS even starts loading. (I'm thinking of Desktops here, with long POST times - often 25-35 seconds on high end gamer boards... that's at least a 10 second headstart after the drive(s) initialize.) An HDD with SSD-speed boots would certainly make headlines, and gamers wouldn't think anything about dropping an extra $60+ on that.

Anyway, thank you for your time. I hope someone reads this and considers it.

 

-Kramy