So Western Digital has a 1TB hard drive containing two processors on board. Why?

[Deja Q]

It was $225 and whose warranty was slightly more than only half of the competition, but I opted for the $200 Seagate competition and I prefer Seagate anyway... (it was on sale for $170 online only but I needed it today)

But I digress. What would a 2nd processor on the HD be good for, as the slowest part of a hard drive is the mechanical portion, and with a quad core system I wouldn't notice the difference anyway...

?

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

1. I didn't know they had a second processor

I know something would be neat is a 500 Gig Hardrive with four 500 Gig platters setup as Raid 1.

The processor would have to be a embedded linux that can't be configured by the user.

[RoyGBiv]

2. You've heard of VelociRaptor?

Yes?

The mechanical bits make hard drives slow, but the ability streamline the movement of those mechanical parts and how data is collected and cached is accomplished through the processor.

You're talking about the Caviar Black, right? WD borrowed that from its own VelociRaptor line to better seek times.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. They are pretty impressive

The Maxtor DualWave controllers actually have two RISC processors on them.

[Deja Q]

8. Yup, have a velociraptor... and I am talking about the caviar black...

Interesting... With the hassle I've been through, I'll stay with seagate, but that's good to know -- thanks!

[ChromeFoundry]

3. This has always been the case for SCSI drives

that were designed for use in high-end servers requiring speedy IO. It sounds like the ATA drives are following this model by utilizing two microprocessors on the controller pcb. Typically, one microprocessor would control seek, read, write and error correction operations on the mechanical portion of the drive, where as the second microprocessor would manage data caching, read-ahead prefetch, buffering and Data IO functions. As hard drives on the desktop are spinning faster and now commonly contain 16 MB of buffer space, this becomes a computational intensive task to manage. This is how the manufacturers are able to stream multiple video data streams to multiple applications/endnodes without performance loss.

[RoyGBiv]

5. And now I want one ...

That was like ... techie porn. :-)

Issues like this are what make video rendering such a pain in the ass sometimes. It's like I have two (well, three if you count Windows) machines. One for daily use and another, with a completely different setup so as to tweak every last bit of processor power and memory use out of it, for video stuff.

Thanks for the more descriptive explanation.

[ChromeFoundry]

6. Always trust your...

TechnoLust! :)

[RoyGBiv]

7. Always do ...

My banker hates me for it.