I guess this is (like most 15000 rpm disks) enterprise only stuff. It will likely be installed on servers or storage devices.

The advantages would be that disk life is not limited by write cycles... the disadvantages are noise, and power and cooling requirements (expect it to run fairly hot).

Would be interesting to compare this to the new QLC/PLC drives (the high capacity, low cost, relatively low performance SSDs).

A mechanical disk will always get stomped in certain workloads (lots of random access) but it might be competitive in others.

MagneticAlly suspended bearings
Small diameter
In a vacuum

Might not be what you expect

Yikes! The 15K RPM SCSI drive I've got crammed in my G4 MDD is already pretty loud. That 20k monster could probably draw blood - from the ears!

Woweee.... I wonder what person at WD came up with that idea; probably somebody who just wanted to see if it could be done and they actually got the idea approved by some higher up that didn't have any idea what it would involve.

All of Western Digital's "secret sauce" is related to their mechanical disk technology, so it's not surprising they would continue to push it. If it can compete with SSDs in some workloads with a super fast mechanical HDD, then they have a product nobody else has in the market.

If mechanical disks go away, WD can only compete on SSDs, which is quickly becoming a commodity. And WD doesn't have any specific technology that makes their SSDs better than other vendors.

Personally i say "bring it on" because mechanical HDDs are amazing in principle, even though I've always hated using them.

That article is from 2008. Looking around, it looks like the consensus is that the increase in RPM increases the power usage too much to make it worthwhile.

Take a look at this page.. and read the comments as well. A ton of good information about this subject in there:
https://thessdguy.com/why-dont-hdds-spin-fast … r-than-15k-rpm/

Would be really nice to figure out more about the WD 20K RPM HDD