how to speed up a 7200rpm harddrive?

[legacyfan]

is there a way to speed up a harddrive? The fastest they can get right now is 7200 but can they run better? If there is any tools out there or anything on how to do this it would be much appreciated

[jaclaz]

The motor is usually powered at 12V, very likely it can stand a 15-20% voltage increase, at 14.4 V it would probably reach 8,640 RPM, give or take 33 and1/2 tolerance.

You can replace some 15-20 SMT components on the PCB board and write a new firmware for it.

You only need 5-10 years in UNI+experience in hardware engineering, some 5-10 years in software development for embedded devices, another 5-10 years experience with access to hard disk manufacturers codebase, a semiconductor factory willing to create a new SMOOTH chip and you will probably have a working prototype.

Ah, wait, before I forget, you will also need a soldering iron and a USB to TTL converter.

jaclaz

[legacyfan]

33 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

The motor is usually powered at 12V, very likely it can stand a 15-20% voltage increase, at 14.4 V it would probably reach 8,640 RPM, give or take 33 and1/2 tolerance.

You can replace some 15-20 SMT components on the PCB board and write a new firmware for it.

You only need 5-10 years in UNI+experience in hardware engineering, some 5-10 years in software development for embedded devices, another 5-10 years experience with access to hard disk manufacturers codebase, a semiconductor factory willing to create a new SMOOTH chip and you will probably have a working prototype.

Ah, wait, before I forget, you will also need a soldering iron and a USB to TTL converter.

jaclaz

wow that seems like a lot of work (hopefully somebody will be willing to do this (i don't really know much about this kind of stuff and I don't have any degrees)

Edited January 10, 2023 by legacyfan

[billmcct]

If you got big bucks you could get a 10,000 rpm commercial drive.

[D.Draker]

8 hours ago, jaclaz said:

The motor is usually powered at 12V, very likely it can stand a 15-20% voltage increase, at 14.4 V it would probably reach 8,640 RPM, give or take 33 and1/2 tolerance.

You can replace some 15-20 SMT components on the PCB board and write a new firmware for it.

You only need 5-10 years in UNI+experience in hardware engineering, some 5-10 years in software development for embedded devices, another 5-10 years experience with access to hard disk manufacturers codebase, a semiconductor factory willing to create a new SMOOTH chip and you will probably have a working prototype.

Ah, wait, before I forget, you will also need a soldering iron and a USB to TTL converter.

jaclaz

Jokes aside, there were some limited number of models that could be reflashed with their original firmware. For example, when WD acquired Hitachi, they simply continued to produce their drives with a modded firmware that reduced their speed to make less noisy drives for cold storages. We all know Hitachi and Toshiba are noisy as hell. The japs never cared about comfort of their userbase. 

[j7n]

You can reduce the workload for the hard drive by avoiding processes that write small fragmented pieces of data to it. Get more RAM and don't use the swap file. Download in one or a few continuous streams. Keep temp files on a separate partion and wipe it out occasionally. It's rare that you would practically run into the limit of the drive's linear speed.