This is 100% not true. The engines are sealed by the FIA and replacing parts of the engine incurs gird penalties. You have a limit of 4 engines a year you can swap without a penalty. In the last 2 races both Lewis and Valtteri took penalties for swapping out the ICE part of the system. When Max had the crash at Silverstone with Lewis, RedBull was not 100% sure of the state of the engine as they are not allowed to disassemble it. They had to use fiber optic cameras to look inside. Even then they got it wrong and Max took a new engine in Turkey.
Being pedantic, the modern engines that you're talking about don't run at 20,000 RPM either, they are limited to 15,000 RPM and I believe they basically never actually reach that limit, usually topping out at 12,000-13,000 instead.
When the engines did run closer to 20,000 they were indeed rebuilt much more often. I am not well versed in F1 regulation history but Wikipedia claims that before 2005 engines were not required to last for two race weekends[1], meaning you could rebuild the engine between each race weekend if you wanted to. At that time there was no RPM limit[2] for the engines and the iconic Ferrari F2004 supposedly maxed out at 19,000 RPM[3].
So maybe the comment you are replying to is referring to pre-2005 F1 engines :) I have no idea myself if a modern F1 engine could run at 20,000 and still be as durable as the current engines or if running at such high RPM inherently means bad durability.
We're talking about a tiny spinning disc on a brushless hub motor. There's basically a single moving part, maybe a few more if riding on ball bearings.
Do you have any understanding of what is going on inside a many-cylinder internal combustion piston engine spinning at 20k rpm? We can view the flywheel as the hard disk platter equivalent, the real madness is at the reciprocating mass being flung back and forth at the same rate.
Edit: Here's another useful reference point to help put RPM numbers into perspective: a turbocharger's rotating assembly spins on the order of 200-300k RPM without flying apart. A minute is a pretty long time.
You're underselling what HDDs do. The seeks they have to do are so precision, if you made the hard drive the size of the earth, the "head" would still only be a couple meters from the ground and it would have to go any square meter on the entire earth in 1/100 of a second. It's absolutely incredible that the tiny SATA bay in my computer holds an 18TB drive. That's 18 * 8 trillion bits of data, or if the hard drive had the surface area of the earth, 282 bits per square meter.
This precision structure has to be maintained at 10k RPM. Can it be maintained at 20k RPM? Maybe not so easily. Let's not undersell the technology.
okay, i guess in my mind I automatically translate “coming apart at those speeds” to “the microstructure stretches to a degree it’s impossible to read/write to the drives”. Nothing catastrophic.
Hard drives have slightly higher longevity requirements.