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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."
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
Power usage = heat.
From the StorageReview.com article:
When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.
I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
The first 10KRPM drives sounded like what you'd get when you put ice cubes in a blender. I seriously ducked the first time I heard one start to seek.
The WD Raptor 74GB is alright. I can hear it, but I wouldn't say it's loud or annoying (and I have one of those open Lian-Li cases that have 50000 holes).
This new one is supposed to be one of the quietest drives ever measured.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.
Besides, why are you relying on a single drive? If you have Important Documents you need redundancy + backups, not a "better" hard drive. You should check this out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
Actually, you can remove the 3.5" container (I believe running it like this voids your warranty) but it still won't fit in a laptop because apparently although 2.5" form factor, it is several mm too high for a laptop. Not that you should attempt to run a 10K drive inside a laptop in the first place, especially without that heatsink thingy. The performance seems to be equal or better than SSD's. source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
They did make the heatsink easily removable, but the drive is designed for the 15mm enterprise form factor (servers, for example), not laptop form factors.
The heatsink (which reduces average temperatures by 5-7 degrees) does work (it's not for show), but these things will never go in laptops.
I would suggest you check out the storagereview.com review since they don't support the claims you are making. In applications benchmarks the margins are far, far less than 50%.
Yes, they did replace them all, but when you count in all the time in rebuilding OS installs, shipping, phone calls to get RMA's, etc, it's just not worth it.
Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.
I had sworn off of WD drives in the mid/late '90's because of similar issues. No matter what, though, I couldn't talk my boss out of using them. He learned to listen to my opinions after that, though...
Now, before I start getting modded down to hell, here; yes, I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives. Unfortunately (for WD), your experiences seem to be far and few between. I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.
bork bork bork!
FWIW, 2.5" HD's generally use between 2 to 3 watts of power during seek and writes and even less during idle. This is about 1/2 to 1/3 the power of the VelociRaptor (6.9W) during a write.