can a HDD be Overclocked...

[Pelu]

sup people... I was reading a troll post by someone in the CPU threads here... and someone say something about HDD Overclocking... and increasing the RPMS...

It is true you can OC your harddisk and increase the RPM!???? how if there is a way.... I was thinking on grabbing my old HDD and OC it until it explode and see how the disks fly like UFOS lol!...

plz forgive my destructive nature....

 

[Dorkenstein]

I doubt it, and if there was a way by some remote chance, it would be an absolutely terrible idea. If you want to ruin your hard drive you can just soak it in kerosene and set it on fire. Don't do that either.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Chances are, if you can do it (which I doubt, without some kind of voltage mod that will essentially just run the motor faster), it'll make the platters fly out so fast it could kill someone.

I wouldn't do it.

 

[Syntax Error]

No.

Hard drives are made to very exacting specifications and any attempts to up the speed on the spindle motor probably won't end well for the hard drive at all.

You can short stroke to improve performance, which is another thing altogether.

 

[EarthwormJim]

The only things you can do to a hard drive to alter their performance (besides Windows tweaks and RAID) are; short stroking and disabling Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM).

 

[Pelu]

what is short stroking... sounds like something needs weld in the HDD board below lol

 

[betaflame]

No, you just partition it such that the head doesn't need to seek very far, you loose most of your space though.

 

[Modelworks]

Theoretically you could overclock a hard drive, we did it with CD roms back in the late 90's. The principal is the same. You increase the spindle speed by increasing the PWM rate controlling the motor and then increase the processing speed of the dsp so that it can handle the data that is now coming in faster. You also would have to alter the firmware to account for the changes. It would likely burn out the motor and dsp in a very short time. When we did it on cdroms we managed to make a 48x cdrom into a 72X, it lasted a whole 41 seconds, oddly the thing that went is the servo controlling the laser position. It was just to prove it could be done so it served its purpose.

 

[PandaBear]

No, if they could do it they already would. Remember: some drive head are flying only tens of nm above the media so it doesn't take a lot of mis-adjustment in the all analog internal of a hard drive to get head crash or data corruptions.

 

[jimhsu]

It may be worth revisiting this question in the wake of flash SSDs. I'm pretty sure it's difficult directly overclocking flash memory, but overclocking the RAM buffer (for writes and such) should be theoretically possible. (Isn't the Vertex turbo essentially an overclocked Vertex with better specced components?) Not to say you should do this, though.

From post on intel SSDs:

i wouldn't be so sure about not seeing overclocked SSD ...

as this article points out, intel puts a focus on reliability ... but to do so they do sacrifice performance. the voltage applied to the transistors to store data is calibrated to write the cells quickly while maintaining a good life span. a higher voltage could be applied that would allow the cells to be written faster but would reduce the number of writes that a cell could handle.

if intel says 100gb a day for 5 years ... i don't need that by a long shot. i would be very willing to sacrifice a lot of that for more speed.

i actually spoke with intel about the possibility of overclocking their ssd drives at idf -- it is something that could be done as it is controlled via the firmware of the drive. if intel doesn't convolute their firmware too much or if they allow enthusiasts to have the necessary control over settings at that level we could very well see overclocked SSDs ...

which would be very interesting indeed.

 

[PandaBear]

NAND flash operates not on an external clock for the time consuming operation internally (read/program/erase). The only "clock" it runs on is the command and data transfer between the ASIC and the NAND, a smaller fraction of the operation time. It also not operates on an external voltage directly either. It uses a charge pump to raise its internal voltage to something like 20V, so applying more voltage to it doesn't help.

The ASIC of an SSD is also build using different processes as CPU, so many of them are already running near the peak of its limit and therefore won't get more than a marginal gain. SanDisk sold an overclocked ExtremeIV CF card once, called Ducati Edition, and it is only 45MB/S vs. 40MB/S of the standard Extreme IV.

The only way you can sacrifice reliability for performance is to use a different garbage collection and caching algorithm, and I don't think any SSD manufacture will try to do that, because it is difficult enough to have good enough reliability for the large OEM's torture test (even Samsung and SanDisk fail once in a while when having design change). SSD for netbook is being used in a very mild manner so they don't expect it to fail like desktop or server.