Hard drives have a processor on them; it’s job is to figure out the best paths for the drive heads. Western Digital now has dual-processor hard drives, and that initially sounds great because two is better than one, right? Maybe.
Western Digital recently started offering dual-processor hard drives like this one. It has some beefy cache at 32MB and promises 20% speed increase over comparable hard drives without dual-proc.
The question however is – What does dual-processor actually do?
Here’s your answer:
On these particular hard drives, WD added an actuator for each hard drive head which should result in better overall speed and performance, but what happened is that the HDD’s processor ended up slowing things down because it couldn’t compute the paths fast enough. Solution: Add another processor, paths are computed optimally, problem solved – and overall performance is improved.
Yes, a dual-proc HDD is faster than a standard 7200 RPM with a single proc, but – and this is a big but – strictly speaking of speed and access time, it’s not really any better than a 10,000 RPM HDD.
There is a benefit however with dual-proc because it’s still 7200 RPM, meaning it spins slower and therefore should last longer than a 10,000 or greater. You can consider a dual-proc HDD as a 7200 that runs like a 10,000 without the "over 7200 liability", so to speak.
Just don’t expect a dual-proc HDD to be fastest-thing-ever, because it isn’t. The 15,000 RPM is still the speed king for platter-based drives, with the tradeoff being a higher failure rate (they wear out faster).
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Meh. The future of storage isn’t with anything platter-based and mechanical. Eventually, we’ll move on to something like SSD as a standard.
Hey David,
You are correct, as a matter of fact you will see some amazing
SSD improvements be released very soon. but platters won’t be
history in the near future. The best price I’,ve seen lately on an
SSD was 60 gigs for $99.00.
My back up is 2 TB’s so I’ll be keeping it for awhile I’m sure.
I use my PC for video editing and effects rendering. Would someone like me be better off with a dual-core HDD? Will SDD techology improve enough to become viable for people working in post-production?
I ask because I’m planning to purchase a RAID array soon. I wonder if I have to hold my horses or go for it right now…
Saverio,
For now buy the RAID, before you buy read reviews
and make sure someone has tested the backup AND
the recovery. There are systems available that don’t
work like you expect them to.
I’ve been using the WD Blue drives that don’t have the dual processor and I have no complaints about their performance. They simply work fine. I’d rather spend the extra cash on another WD Blue drive, even if it has a smaller cache, as both mine satisfy my needs and are plenty fast from my experience. I’ve had an excellent track record with all my WD drives. They all still run after years of work.
And Dave, I think it will be years before the average system builder adopts SSD as their standard choice of HDD. I for one, like to hear a little something from my HDDs to know it’s health and when to run utilities.
I also doubt the end of platter drives is even near. I think there’s more innovation for platter drives in the near future that will add more competition vs. SDD.
SSD are certainly fast, but very expensive. This is an interesting approach by WD.