Any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind?

T wrote:

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Do the HDDs support SATA-3 (6Gbps) AND does the mobo's SATA controller
also support SATA-3? There wouldn't be much point in buying HDDs with a
faster interface if the mobo were incapable of supporting the bandwidth.

Hopefully this customers understands that RAID-1 is only for hardware
disaster recovery but there will still be a usage outage. Unless the
customer actually has a reserve HDD waiting in a shelf for immediate
replacement of the primary HDD that fails, their computer is dead until
the customer gets a replacement HDD or has to steal the cloned HDD and
forego cloning and hence be unprotected until they get a replacement
HDD. There's no protection against infection or corruption of files:
whatever **** happens on the true drive gets replicated on the clone.
RAID-1 does *not* preclude the need for [multiple] backups.

So the customer wants RAID-1 (cloning). Will this customer have a spare
HDD on hand to immediately swap in when either the primary or cloned HDD
dies? If not, the 2-3 hours added for restoring from image backup is
only 4% more time added to the 3-day wait for rush delivery of a
replacement HDD. After all, cloning won't restore a corrupted or
infected file since it'll be in the same state on the clone drive.
Obviously backups are worthless unless they are scheduled at regular
intervals, like daily. Cloning won't let you restore to a prior version
of a file as backup allows. Editing that doc that you then screw up
will also be screw up the copy on the clone drive and you can't walk
back to a prior version without backups. Cloning is only for hardware
recovery (provided you have a spare HDD on hand). Backups are for
versioning and data recovery.

The customer already has 2 HDDs: one for the true copy and another for
the cloned copy. So why not get a 3rd HDD and go to RAID-5? The
customer would get the advantage of striping along with hardware
recovery - plus, unlike RAID-1, his computer would still be usable with
1 drive down (albeit a bit slower) so he can continue using his computer
until the replacement drive shows up. RAID-5 would give the speed boost
(well, in the benchmarks as the computer is still going to be mostly
waiting for user) and the computer stays up when an HDD dies and while
waiting for replacement HDD. Raid-10 would give even more bandwidth but
would require a 4th HDD. Of course, having a bigger pipe doesn't mean
the user will tap that potential volume.

Or does this customer not really have RAID support but instead has only
stripe and clone support (RAID 0 or 1) on a mobo controller? Onboard
RAID controllers are slow. The cheapie RAID daughtercards are just as
bad because they are nothing more than the hybrid controller found on
mobos. The sub-$100 RAID daughtercards are meant to provide the RAID
support missing on the mobo but a mobo-style RAID controller is limp. A
good RAID 0/1/5/10/50 daughtercard will run $300-$500 (they are their
own subsystem).

You never mentioned cost constraints. Nor did you mention power or
noise constraints which would apply to adding more HDDs for RAID-5/10.
So getting more speed by adding a real RAID controller and having to
replace the PSU to handle the increased load of more HDDs are factors in
designing a faster mass storage subsystem. There may also be a limit of
how many SATA3 ports there are on the mobo so perhaps adding more HDDs
is not an option.

It was my understanding that RAID-1 was supported before RAID-0 as
striping was more difficult to implement with TRIM than is just cloning.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-020674.htm shows which
RAID set is supported by which Intel controller. Don't know which one
you, er, your customer has since the hardware spec wasn't mentioned.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-022830.htm lists which
RAID configs are supported by Intel's RST driver. The home page is at
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support...ftwr-prod/imsm. From
there, http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../cs-020644.htm and
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../cs-020648.htm list the
system and OS requirements. From what I saw there, RAID-1 would be
supported but obviously depends on what hardware you have.

On Sat, 9 May 2015 10:31:04 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

I used to go for 5600 (or was it 5400?) ones if I could find them, as
they seemed to me to run noticeably cooler (which obviously contributed
to the lifespan) - but I don't think anyone makes those any more,
they're all 7x00.

With the push for 'green' drives in recent years, it seems that the
selection of 5400 RPM drives is the best it's ever been. There's been some
consolidation in the drive industry in recent years, so perhaps that's what
you've noticed.

--

Char Jackson

En el artículo , T
escribió:

Do you know of a trusted review?

No, but several knowledgeable colleagues whose opinion I value and trust
are very happy with them. You have to realise they are a compromise
between a spinning rust drive and an SSD and are priced accordingly.

Coming back to your original post: the lack of TRIM support for RAID 1
is not a problem. The firmware in modern SSDs is much better at garbage
collection than earlier ones. Just buy two of your chosen SSD and RAID
away.

I believe some Intel RAID1 configurations now support TRIM, but you'd
have to do your own research on that.

--
:: je suis Charlie :: yo soy Charlie :: ik ben Charlie ::

T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at 10,000
RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much faster than
7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical solution other than
high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1 on an XP machine and
had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.
--
Jeff Barnett

On Sat, 09 May 2015 00:39:43 +0100, mike wrote:

On 5/8/2015 4:22 PM, T wrote:
On 05/08/2015 04:02 PM, mike wrote:
On 5/8/2015 2:17 PM, T wrote:
On 05/08/2015 01:54 PM, SC Tom wrote:


"T" wrote in message
...
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Any 3.5" 7200RPM drive does about 900MPH. That's a pretty fast wind :-)

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

:-)

In a former life, I had to deal with customer requests for product
improvement. If I asked what they wanted, the answer was always, "more."
Didn't matter what it was, they just wanted more.
When I asked why, they had no idea why...more is better.
Often, a better approach to doing things was cheaper and more effective.

I have a 3.6GHz. P4 with a pair of 15KRPM drives in RAID.
Back before it was obsolete, I ran some experiments against a similar
machine with a 7200RPM drive. Sure, I could construct a benchmark
that showed bigger numbers, but sitting at the console, I really
couldn't tell much difference. One thing that did go faster was
the little wheel on the utility meter.

If the program is small enough, maybe a ramdrive would help.

Hi Mike,

I always go for the 7200 units, as they seem to have
a much longer lifespan. And, I also haven't been
able to tell a speed difference.

I was hoping to get something that approximated
and SSD drive.

-T

Buyer's mantra:
What do I want? EVERYTHING!
When do I want it? YESTERDAY!
What do I want to pay for it? NOTHING!

Seller's mantra:
Spend till it hurts!
Spend till the end!
Buy till you die!!!

I use the Buyer's mantra on my distributors all the time.
They just laugh at me (which is the desired result).

:-)
I searched my archives, but couldn't find it.
There was an article on the web whereby a guy took a big
hard drive and managed to reformat it so that it thought it
was a 300MB drive at the fastest part of the platter.
He claimed it had performance equal to a more expensive Cheetah
15K drive.

Can't you just partition it to use the bit you want?

--
A statistician took a standard deviation from his normal way home because the mean of the population was after him.

Jeff Barnett wrote:
T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at 10,000
RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much faster than
7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical solution other than
high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1 on an XP machine and
had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.

But a 15K server drive should be better than a 10K drive.
This impacts seek time, which is a major component of
why spinning drives suck. Adding the hybrid (flash memory
chip) to the controller, helps with certain usage patterns.

3600 (some old drives)
5200 (some video recorder drives, reduces heat output)
5400 (laptop drives, desktop drives, some capable of good sustained rates)
7200 (commodity drives sweet spot, some with less aggressive noiseless seek)
10K (server drives and Velociraptor consumer drives)
15K (server drives, aggressive seek, quite noise
some make a "buzzing noise" every 71 seconds, cannot sleep in same room)

HTH,
Paul

Paul wrote on 5/9/2015 12:16 PM:
Jeff Barnett wrote:
T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at
10,000 RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much
faster than 7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical
solution other than high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1
on an XP machine and had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.

But a 15K server drive should be better than a 10K drive.
This impacts seek time, which is a major component of
why spinning drives suck. Adding the hybrid (flash memory
chip) to the controller, helps with certain usage patterns.

3600 (some old drives)
5200 (some video recorder drives, reduces heat output)
5400 (laptop drives, desktop drives, some capable of good sustained rates)
7200 (commodity drives sweet spot, some with less aggressive noiseless
seek)
10K (server drives and Velociraptor consumer drives)
15K (server drives, aggressive seek, quite noise
some make a "buzzing noise" every 71 seconds, cannot sleep in
same room)

HTH,
Paul
Problem with 15K drives - all are SCSI today - is the need for SCSI
hardware and the cost for 1TB would feed a family of 4 for 6 months. The
WD are SATA and impose only small financial penalties.
--
Jeff Barnett

Jeff Barnett wrote:
Paul wrote on 5/9/2015 12:16 PM:
Jeff Barnett wrote:
T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at
10,000 RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much
faster than 7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical
solution other than high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1
on an XP machine and had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.

But a 15K server drive should be better than a 10K drive.
This impacts seek time, which is a major component of
why spinning drives suck. Adding the hybrid (flash memory
chip) to the controller, helps with certain usage patterns.

3600 (some old drives)
5200 (some video recorder drives, reduces heat output)
5400 (laptop drives, desktop drives, some capable of good sustained
rates)
7200 (commodity drives sweet spot, some with less aggressive noiseless
seek)
10K (server drives and Velociraptor consumer drives)
15K (server drives, aggressive seek, quite noise
some make a "buzzing noise" every 71 seconds, cannot sleep in
same room)

HTH,
Paul
Problem with 15K drives - all are SCSI today - is the need for SCSI
hardware and the cost for 1TB would feed a family of 4 for 6 months. The
WD are SATA and impose only small financial penalties.

The server drives are SAS (serial attached SCSI). The 15K one I found
as an example, runs at 12Gbit/sec max bus speed. Yes, you'd need a
SAS controller, and there might be the odd workstation motherboard
with a built-in SAS on it.

$290 gets you a card with no mention of RAID, and no memory cache on board.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151116

A second board for $500 was the same way, no RAID. Some of those
non-RAID boards are mentioned here.

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/sasnoneraid6g.htm

RAID 1 in hardware is kinda a waste. Cards like these
are probably a better investment for RAID5 or RAID6.

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1883.htm

$630 gets you a starter RAID card, plus two $500 hard drives.
So $1630 plus the costs of a few cable converters.
This one has 2GB of cache RAM soldered down. (No convenient
SODIMM or DIMM slot for removal/upgrade.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151149

I didn't see a proper hydra cable in the box on that one
for $630, so what's another $30 for such a project. Beats
the $100 a piece we used to pay for some of the SCSI cables.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812400143

And remember, it's a strawman project, not meant to be
practical.

If we bump up the project to RAID 10 with eight drives
(four drives in RAID0 times two for mirroring), then we get a
"contender". The seek time sucks, but it's got real good sustained
transfer rate (233*4 = 932MB/sec at beginning of disks). Some of
the modern Arecas can do 2-4GB/sec (make sure you're getting
the right one). Now our project costs 630+8*500+2*30 = $4660.
Pretty decent for a strawman.

Paul

On 05/09/2015 06:02 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
T wrote:

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Do the HDDs support SATA-3 (6Gbps) AND does the mobo's SATA controller
also support SATA-3? There wouldn't be much point in buying HDDs with a
faster interface if the mobo were incapable of supporting the bandwidth.

They will either be SATA-3 or SAS-3 ports


Hopefully this customers understands that RAID-1 is only for hardware
disaster recovery but there will still be a usage outage. Unless the
customer actually has a reserve HDD waiting in a shelf for immediate
replacement of the primary HDD that fails, their computer is dead until
the customer gets a replacement HDD or has to steal the cloned HDD and
forego cloning and hence be unprotected until they get a replacement
HDD. There's no protection against infection or corruption of files:
whatever **** happens on the true drive gets replicated on the clone.
RAID-1 does *not* preclude the need for [multiple] backups.

She is getting a nice backup system too.


So the customer wants RAID-1 (cloning). Will this customer have a spare
HDD on hand to immediately swap in when either the primary or cloned HDD
dies? If not, the 2-3 hours added for restoring from image backup is
only 4% more time added to the 3-day wait for rush delivery of a
replacement HDD. After all, cloning won't restore a corrupted or
infected file since it'll be in the same state on the clone drive.
Obviously backups are worthless unless they are scheduled at regular
intervals, like daily. Cloning won't let you restore to a prior version
of a file as backup allows. Editing that doc that you then screw up
will also be screw up the copy on the clone drive and you can't walk
back to a prior version without backups. Cloning is only for hardware
recovery (provided you have a spare HDD on hand). Backups are for
versioning and data recovery.

The customer already has 2 HDDs: one for the true copy and another for
the cloned copy. So why not get a 3rd HDD and go to RAID-5? The
customer would get the advantage of striping along with hardware
recovery - plus, unlike RAID-1, his computer would still be usable with
1 drive down (albeit a bit slower) so he can continue using his computer
until the replacement drive shows up. RAID-5 would give the speed boost
(well, in the benchmarks as the computer is still going to be mostly
waiting for user) and the computer stays up when an HDD dies and while
waiting for replacement HDD. Raid-10 would give even more bandwidth but
would require a 4th HDD. Of course, having a bigger pipe doesn't mean
the user will tap that potential volume.

LSI controllers can operated degraded (one of the RAID 1 pair removed)
indefinitely. Well until the other drive fails (happened to me once).
It would be nice to talk her into a hot spare.


Or does this customer not really have RAID support but instead has only
stripe and clone support (RAID 0 or 1) on a mobo controller? Onboard
RAID controllers are slow. The cheapie RAID daughtercards are just as
bad because they are nothing more than the hybrid controller found on
mobos. The sub-$100 RAID daughtercards are meant to provide the RAID
support missing on the mobo but a mobo-style RAID controller is limp. A
good RAID 0/1/5/10/50 daughtercard will run $300-$500 (they are their
own subsystem).

I have always been suspicious and went with an LSI card. Thank you
for confirmation!


You never mentioned cost constraints.

$5,000.00 U$D. (I told her I could do a lot better.)

Nor did you mention power or
noise constraints

Two drives versus one is not going to add much noise. And the fans
blowing across them will be PWM (temperature controlled)

which would apply to adding more HDDs for RAID-5/10.
So getting more speed by adding a real RAID controller and having to
replace the PSU to handle the increased load of more HDDs are factors in
designing a faster mass storage subsystem. There may also be a limit of
how many SATA3 ports there are on the mobo so perhaps adding more HDDs
is not an option.

It was my understanding that RAID-1 was supported before RAID-0 as
striping was more difficult to implement with TRIM than is just cloning.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-020674.htm shows which
RAID set is supported by which Intel controller. Don't know which one
you, er, your customer has since the hardware spec wasn't mentioned.
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../CS-022830.htm lists which
RAID configs are supported by Intel's RST driver. The home page is at
http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/support...ftwr-prod/imsm. From
there, http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../cs-020644.htm and
http://www.intel.com/support/chipset.../cs-020648.htm list the
system and OS requirements. From what I saw there, RAID-1 would be
supported but obviously depends on what hardware you have.

The chipset will probably be a C222 or a C224.

Intel specifically told me there was no TRIM support for RAID 1
under Windows 7. Linux has it, but that doesn't help me here.

Thank you for helping me with this! As always, you are an
incredible wealth of information!

-T

On 05/09/2015 06:58 AM, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
En el artículo , T
escribió:

Do you know of a trusted review?

No, but several knowledgeable colleagues whose opinion I value and trust
are very happy with them. You have to realise they are a compromise
between a spinning rust drive and an SSD and are priced accordingly.

Yes, I see both opinions.


Coming back to your original post: the lack of TRIM support for RAID 1
is not a problem. The firmware in modern SSDs is much better at garbage
collection than earlier ones. Just buy two of your chosen SSD and RAID
away.

Without TRIM , the drives will degrade to 20 to 40% of their
original speed. Take a look at this graph:

http://img.fcenter.ru/imgmat/article...500/207103.png



I believe some Intel RAID1 configurations now support TRIM, but you'd
have to do your own research on that.

Intel tech support specifically told me they do not.

Thank you for helping me with this!

_T

On 05/09/2015 09:59 AM, Jeff Barnett wrote:
T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at 10,000
RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much faster than
7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical solution other than
high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1 on an XP machine and
had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.

Thank you!

Do SAS drive fail immediately?

T wrote:
On 05/09/2015 09:59 AM, Jeff Barnett wrote:
T wrote on 5/8/2015 2:28 PM:
Hi All,

I have a customer who really, really wants RAID 1.
(She is well away of the difference between backup
and RAID.)

Problem: no TRIM support for RAID 1.

Are there any mechanical hard drive that go like the wind
out these? Sort of like a (poor) substitute for SSDs?

Many thanks,
-T

Other than hybrids, there are the WD Velociraptors which spin at 10,000
RPM. I've used them in previous builds and found them much faster than
7200 RPM drives and much faster than any mechanical solution other than
high end SCSI. I've implemented both Raid 0 and 1 on an XP machine and
had no real issues.

WARNING. WD makes two lines of Velociraptors 1) those made for desktop
machines and 2) those made for Raid. The latter report failures
immediately so the entire Raid array doesn't hang trying lengthy
hardware-driven recovery. Make sure you get those in line 1 for your
customer if you choose this WD solution.

Thank you!

Do SAS drive fail immediately?

Is this a reference to TLER perhaps ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TLER

st600mp0065 technical specifications (Page 35)

http://www.seagate.com/www-content/p...100748152b.pdf

Table 5 Read and write retry count maximum recovery times

Read retry count* Maximum recovery time per LBA (cumulative, ms)

20 (default) 1538 milliseconds

Raid timeouts might be on the order of seven seconds,
and 1.5 seconds is pretty low. It means the drive
will do a block substitution or schedule one for
later, based on 1.5 seconds or retries.

Since a SAS drive is SCSI underneath, it has "mode pages",
and with the right software, you can tune the drive. That's
why the retry count gives the impression it is adjustable.
Because it probably is. I used to use FWB on Mac for
mode pages, but they had to add drive models to the software
one at a time, which means the odds of getting any function
from it were limited.

I haven't checked, but there might be a mode page to
adjust drive caching behavior. Some drives used to
have single thread versus eight thread caching. You
selected the eight thread mode, if the disk was in
a server. Single thread caching gives better performance
for a desktop user accessing a single file. It is probably
set to a server mode by default, and likely doesn't
hurt anything to just leave it alone :-) It's a way
of dicing up the cache RAM, and giving each thread
a limit of 1/8th of the available RAM (so one
caching thread, doesn't evict the other, lesser
active threads).

Paul

On Sat, 09 May 2015 18:03:59 +0100, "Tough Guy no. 1265"
wrote:

On Sat, 09 May 2015 00:39:43 +0100, mike wrote:

I searched my archives, but couldn't find it.
There was an article on the web whereby a guy took a big
hard drive and managed to reformat it so that it thought it
was a 300MB drive at the fastest part of the platter.
He claimed it had performance equal to a more expensive Cheetah
15K drive.

Can't you just partition it to use the bit you want?

I suspect that it's not as easy as it might seem at first. I don't know how
old the article is that's referenced above, but a 300MB drive is completely
useless in today's world. Whatever drive you start with, there's no point if
you're going to end up with something that's wickedly fast but too small to
do anything with. In addition, with drives having multiple platters, you
really need to know what's going on inside unless the whole thing is going
to be trial and error.

--

Char Jackson

On Sun, 10 May 2015 06:52:54 +0100, Char Jackson wrote:

On Sat, 09 May 2015 18:03:59 +0100, "Tough Guy no. 1265"
wrote:

On Sat, 09 May 2015 00:39:43 +0100, mike wrote:

I searched my archives, but couldn't find it.
There was an article on the web whereby a guy took a big
hard drive and managed to reformat it so that it thought it
was a 300MB drive at the fastest part of the platter.
He claimed it had performance equal to a more expensive Cheetah
15K drive.

Can't you just partition it to use the bit you want?

I suspect that it's not as easy as it might seem at first. I don't know how
old the article is that's referenced above, but a 300MB drive is completely
useless in today's world. Whatever drive you start with, there's no point if
you're going to end up with something that's wickedly fast but too small to
do anything with. In addition, with drives having multiple platters, you
really need to know what's going on inside unless the whole thing is going
to be trial and error.

Should be easy enough to create a bunch of partitions and test each one, so you can find out which bits are faster. Then you make your partition in that bit.

--
I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same god who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them -- Galileo Galilei