10,000rpm IDE Hard Drives Coming


MacBidouille reports that Western Digital will announce 10,000rpm serial ATA hard drives on February 11.

Specifications cited are:

- 10,000rpm
- 8MB buffer
- 5 year warranty
- MTBF: 1.2 million hours

Hard drive bandwidth is the main bottleneck holding back performance at present. CPU bandwidth can easily handle the fastest hard drives (such as 15,000rpm LVD SCSI, which can deliver sustained speeds of up 160MB/ps, well in excess of any IDE drive currently on the market.

Analysis: On a price:performance basis, IDE is catching up, although there are no figures on the actual performance of the 10,000rpm drives. But these drives should work well as FireWire externals as well, as 7,200rpm/big cache drives demonstrate markedly better performance than 5,400rpm drives.

But, like MacBidouille, we wonder how WD managed to simulate those MTBF-137-years tests. We don't know. We're not hard drive experts!