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Western Digital's VelociRaptor 10K RPM SATA Drive
MojoKid was one of a number of people to submit about WDs new 10k RPM SATA Drive. He says "Western Digital's Raptor line of Hard Drives has been very popular with
performance enthusiasts, as a desktop drive with enterprise-class performance.
Today WD has launched a new line of
high-performance desktop drives dubbed the VelociRaptor, and the product
finally scales in capacity as well. The new SATA-based VelociRaptor weighs in at
300GB with the same 10K RPM spindle speed, but with one other major
difference — it's based on 2.5" technology. Its smaller two-platter, four-head
design affords the VelociRaptor random access and data transfer rates
significantly faster than competing desktop SATA offerings. Areal density per
platter has increased significantly as well, which contributes to
solid performance gains versus the legacy WD Raptor series."
They used a non-standard connector layout so it won't work in the Mac Pro.
Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.
The review only compares the new drive to older models from the same manufacturer, and it turns out to be faster - duh. How does the performance compare with those expensive solid state disks that are starting to appear?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive? Or is it a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" shell?
I assume the power requirements would be intense though, so even if you could fit it in a laptop I suppose it would be unwise unless you're always plugged in.
And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM.
Just make those checks out to "Western Digital, C/O Slashdot" please.
I've always wondered - what's the noise like on a 10k drive? I would think its safe to assume that they're louder, but with smaller platters, who knows. I'm always working to make my machine quieter, and sometimes this seems to come into conflict with making it faster.
-dave
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The review is up on on StorageReview.com . You can use the database to compare this drive to every other drive out there in different kinds of tasks.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
It's a little better than the current Raptors' 0.88 GB/$, but nowhere close to the 6.25 GB/$ for a Samsung Spinpoint F1. You gotta wonder if a RAID array of cheaper drives wouldn't give you overall better performance, and more than 2x the storage for way less money.
The main problem I see with this drive is the cost, for $300 you can get 2 750GB hard drives, put them in RAID 0 and get 5 times as much storage space and probably almost the same performance. Granted there is the risk of increased failure with a RAID 0 setup, but the increase in storage space is probably worth it.
If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.
Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.
I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
As others pointed out, you can get more space and faster throughput with current 7200 rpm drives for less money. The only application left for this drive is one that has massive amounts of small accesses all over the drive. Typically this is swap space (invest the money into more RAM instaed) or database servers (10000 rpm do not matter much there, get a proper 15000 rpm drive for these). Soem may think they would be good for webservers (get more ram and that 15000rpm drive if you need more performance. Alternatively get a number of smaller drives, which will likely give even better performance.)
Bottom line: There is no market for these things except people that do not understand what it really offers (or does not).
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
After all so many years, drives are still so slow.
7.6ms random access write. 119MB/sec transfer - that's less that 1Gbps.
So still have to stick lots and lots of drives together.
They won't even publish the platter to head transfer rate. I luckily picked up a free 146GB SCSI drive about 6 years ago that does a blazing 108Mb/s from the platter to the head. I am still looking for an SATA drive that is comparable :/
I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors...
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
I've never seen the point in Raptor drives. This is making me think about getting 1 or 2 (RAIDed) Raptors to use in installing my games and movie files on. Tom's Hardware has a pretty thurough review, and it perorms very well all across the board.
Depending on price, I may go and pick one up.
I just saw a SATA Backplane at Fry's for 2.5" drives. It fit Four 2.5 SATA drives in the space of one 5.25 slot on your machine. You could fit a RAID5 Array of these little (noisy?) guys into just about any desktop, or more drives than you'd have RAID cards (and power?) for in some of the bigger cases (CM stacker, et al)
Well, if these drives are anything like the mybook, the speed won't make any difference, since they will become boat anchors within a few weeks. Don't bother calling for a new one, since the indian call center can't figure anything out anyway. My next one won't be a western digital, that's for sure.
The 2.5" form factor seems to have been standard in the server world for some time now. I could be wrong, but I think this is driven by the need to cram more and more computing power into finite rack space. And once the drive makers tooled up to make 2.5" drives for servers, it was bound to drive down the cost of 2.5" desktop drives.
But here's the sad thing: most of this technology is both produced and consumed in countries that have long since gone to the metric system. But because the U.S. sets the standards, everybody uses English Traditional units for linear measure. Which helps to advertise our arrogance and backwardness. Not as bad as starting pointless wars, but it doesn't help!
After having not just 1, but TWO WD Caviar drives (one 80gb and one 100gb) fail in '03 due to the same faulty motor controller chip, I vowed never to buy WD again. And I haven't. The drives are still in my dustbin waiting for me to get the patience to unsolder the chip and put a different one in so I can recover data (I had about 80% of it backed up; it's the other 20% that hurts.) The drives were technically under warranty but they wouldn't listen to any option that would allow me to recover my data. (Yeah, I realize that policy is industry wide, but when the problem is obvious - a chip with a crater in it - they could have at least been nice shipped me a replacement controller board.) If their new drive really needs that much heatsinking, there's gotta be some kind of design problem. If I want an electric heater, I'm not buying it from WD. WD may come out with new and fun stuff, but until it's been proven with stellar MTBF rates (and they back it up with a full 5 year warranty like Seagate's) I'm holding onto my $ and data.
I just recently replaced a dead Seagate HDD that held the OS (WinXP in this case) with a 36GB Raptor, after looking into SSDs but deciding the price point wasn't really there yet. The Raptor is pretty great: XP is ready to go 30 seconds after turning on the power (this is a stripped down version of XP using nLite, so YMMV on XP boot times.. but I've discovered XP is actually a decent desktop OS once you strip out all the extra crap). So I'm happy.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I've gone through 3 drives now from them for 2 of my 3 laptops. The first one made it 10 months and technically was still under warranty. But because the manufacture date stamp on the drive was more than 12 months, they would not honor my warranty. Yea, I had the receipt but the guy in India was not concerned with that and would only take a credit card number to order another one at full retail price! Screw em'. Drilled a big bad hole through the thing and put in recycle bin.
Two other drives didn't even make it more than a month! First one died after a month and was sent off to them under warranty, and they send another of the exact same drive. It worked quite well up until last week when it just arbitrarily died on the spot when I got into the office.
Mind you my Toshiba's, and Seagate have been outlasting these things hands down. And for the naysayers; I know there is not an issue with the laptops since other vendor drives work quite well and last.
I don't even want to talk about the 3.5" drives! I have had more premature failures with these and I'm officially sworn off of Western Digital. All they make is junk.
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You obviously haven't used one. The TRex drive requires a separate room just for the storage. At least the Raptor fits in a normal case (and, if you have a crowbar to remove the damn black metal thing, in a laptop!
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
to journalism. Don't forget to tie your shoe, and wear a sweater. -
This decent round-up here finished off the Raptor line for me. A SpinPoint is much cheaper, much larger and has a lot less noise too. So why bother? Maybe the VelociRaptor will perform better, but I've seen a lot of PC builders get obsessed with the 'badge', i.e. someone told them that their games will run faster with a Raptor...
These fit fine in my 63.5mm drive bays.
In corporate America, geeks consume Velociraptors..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
...Since its not resistant to grapefruit juice...
Who exactly recycles that? Or do you mean you throw the hdd in the recycle bin, which contains the recycle bin that contains the hdd which contains the recycle bin....
Does Jesus ride these new drives?
I didn't say it was particularly hard in a PC, just that the Mac is much easier. You slide out a little metal tray, put the drive in the tray, slide the tray back in. Tada. Memory... you slide out the memory card, put in your dimms, and slide the memory card in. I have big hands, so putting in memory has always aggravated me.
Raid arrays increase access time - from 10-50% depending on the type of array.
However, for streaming data, yes a properly formatted striped array will produce significantly higher throughput. The problem is, for most games/database work, the seek times are actually more important than the throughput. A review of RAID 0 in games showed that while the load time of the game was decreased, there was no significant change to the playability of the game - due to the number of small files loaded during usage - and a better graphics card or more memory were recommended as better investments.
Given the nature of the beast, high end gaming would actually be well suited for 16GB SS/PCI Ram drives - as most games would fit well within that constraint. The problem being transfer rates between the permanent storage of the HD & the running storage of the SSD. If the game folder was tarballed, then a mirrored array would actually improve the load times (assuming the processor can handle untaring the folder as/faster than the array can pass in the data). Either way, it's an even worse pricebreak - $31+/GB for RAMdrives & about 21/GB for SSDs.
Too bad they use a non-standard connector.
Not to mention they're taller than standard laptop drives.
So they won't fit in the backplane. Been to Frys, saw the backplane you're talking about, it's made for laptop drives.
And, as noted in a sibling post, these things would cook themselves to death, even if they DID fit.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
For the money of that Velociraptor, I'd rather build a RAID-10. I figure increased power draw won't make my power bill explode.
Not really, no. People who have a lot of HD failures usually have a lot of other issues.
I've had 3 drives in about 300-400 actually fail. And they were used 5+ years. One was dropped.
This was in the late 90's, the WD800 ATAPI's, so you are 100% FUBAR. 90 percent failure = USER ERROR.
Maybe your personality just annoys electrons. Or, more likely, you are inept at system building.
TIP: Good PSU, install the drives oriented correctly, and maybe a fan or two. Try it.
I've seen a lot of WD drives die, and I wouldn't trust it anyways.
If I'm going to build a new rig, I still won't use WD drives, no matter how fast they are. They're still offering subpar warranty AFAIK.
Did you guys notice that this is the first drive with a spec. sustained data rate that can actually saturate a 1 Gbit/sec ethernet link?
Hard disk performance sure doesn't scale the way network performance does.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Did anyone else think of this?
I don't understand why people get excited about RPM's when seek times for IDE/SATA drives haven't improved in 10 years.
I would love to see a 7200 rpm SATA drive with 5ms seek times.
I've been buying +300 WD's for over 10 years now; had 2 disks DOA and 4 disks which died later on. Most of the older disks I got stored in a container as extra backup.
One of these disks dying is even my own fault by tilting it while writing.
Also, I've been hearing stories at my suppliers; disks made around JUNE-OCTOBER are mostly the ones with the most problems. I wouldn't know it's a general believe although I'm for sure checking my labels before assigning a disk to a server as precaution to myself.
I've had plenty of other drives dying, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi. My last 2 crashes were my Powerbook PRO and with an IBM disk.
Had best effects with IBM, WD and Maxtor to be honest. Maybe I was most lucky with WD's? My first choice will always be a WD.
The Western Digital warranty has always been inbetween 3-5 years, so, I really wonder if your supplier was kosher at all?
They got a very fast and extensive warranty program which even allows you to send your front-plate and keep the disk with your precious data.
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