Today we will discussing about hard disk spindle speed. As hard
Drive or HDD become more advanced and virtually every component in them is required
to do more and work harder and the hard drive spindle motor is no exception as discussed
in detail here how to increasing the speed at which the platters spin improves
both positioning and transfer performance in hard disk. The data can be read
off the disk faster during sequential operations & rotational latency. The
time that the heads must wait for the correct sector number to come under the
head is also reduced, improving random operations. For this reason there has
been a push to increase the speed of the spindle motor, and more than at any
other time in the past, hard disk spin speeds are changing rapidly.
At one time all PC hard disks spun at 3600 rpm in fact for
the first 10 years of the pc’s existence, that was all there was. One reason
for this is that their designs were based on the old designs of large, per PC
hard disks that used AC motors, and standard North American AC power is 60 Hz
per second 3600 RPM in the early manufactures began to realize how much performance
could be improved by increasing spindle speeds. The next step up for 3600 rpm
was 4500 rpm; 5400 rpm soon followed and became a standard for many years. From
there speeds have steadily marched upwards. Usually faster PC hard disk speeds “debut”
on SCSI drives that are used in higher-performance applications, and then
filter down to IDE/ ATA a few years later. At one time 7200 rpm spindle were
only found on top of the line SCSI drivers they are now being used in consumer
IDE/ ATA disks sold at retail while SCSI has moved on to loftier heights. This table shows the most common PC
spindle speeds, their associated average rotational latency and their typical
applications as of early 2000.
Increasing spindle motor speed creator many design
challenges, particularly aimed at keeping vibration and heat under control. As discussed
here, when the motor spins faster these become more of an issue. Some high end
drives have very serious heat vibration and noise problems that required
special mounting and cooling work to allow then to run without problems. To some
sextant there is a trade off between spindle speed and the heat and noise issue.
Engineers generally focus on keeping these matters under control and usually
improve then significantly after the first generation of drivers at any given
spindle speed. However in some applications, using a slower and quieter drives
can make sense.
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