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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.
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
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.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors...
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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.
Couldn't this be useful for gaming? Typically lots of small images, textures, audio, etc. get loaded throughout gameplay.
I'm not a game developer, so I'm just speculating.
Developers: We can use your help.
So...this beats the data throughput of any of the 7200 RPM drives by about 50%, and outperforms them in real world benchmarks by about the same, and it does it while consuming LESS power than the WD Green Power drives. It also for the first time comes within about 10% of the speed of a 10k SCSI disk for server-tasks, while using far, far less power. This sounds like a great low end server drive to me, and it's clearly the best single user drive by a large margin. Check out the storagereview.com review, since they actually know what they're doing.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 is $675.00 at Dell (source: Google, while the Raptor is (supposedly) about $300.
That's 2.25 times the cost per megabyte.
According to this performance database (choose IOMeter 8 I/O. I can't link to it directly, it doesn't seem to support that), the Seagate drive does 293 IOPS vs. the Raptor 3000's 228, so it's only 28% faster (on an 8-deep workload, which is a fairly common one, maybe a little deep).
Cost-per-IOPS wise, the Raptor blows the 15K SCSI drive away. Of course, the Seagate is an SAS drive, which is far more robust for large server installations and such, but for smaller ones, I think the Raptor would be fine. Of course, for most smaller ones, a cheap-o 250GB 7200 RPM RAID1 array would be fine, too.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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
Well... the drives have a heatsink on them that bumb them up to 3.25" size. You can take them out, but it will raise the temp on each drive 4-5 degrees C. Plus add the heat from packing them so close together, and I'm not sure that's such a good idea.
Plus, if you take them out of the heatsink, you void the warranty.
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...
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%.
I beg to differ. After waiting for rev2 of these drives, I'm going to use 4 of them in RAID10 for my database server.
I've currently got 4x 74gb drives, and I've been waiting for the next gen Raptor drives for a while now. I'm glad they are here, and I'm glad they are finally at a more usable size for modern applications.
I hate printers.
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
Does Jesus ride these new drives?
I think western digital is aiming the the home pc market with these. Not the server market. The article goes into server and even compares them to server drives. Most home people do not use SAS drives in their systems. Besides the workstation class systems, are SAS drives even an option? We can add SAS controllers but for the average Joe/Jane picking on this drive when they are building their new Dell/HP is what they are going to do.
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.
Yea but on a mac pro, the drives are out of the way and the rack is standard. You install some drive racks in a 5.25 bay on a PC tower, and you just lost a bunch of internal space because there is still a drive tower inside, empty.
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 could be wrong
Mmm, to some extent, I'm sad to say you are. 2.5" drives are mostly used for speed; last I looked at some arrays the 2.5" version had the same size and cost the same as the 3.5" version. The 3.5" version with 12 750GB SATA disks had 3 times the storage that the 25 disk 2.5" version did. So space efficient it is not.
In fact, if disk vendors want to survive I'd suggest they go the other way and move back to slower 5 1/4" instead. Flash is going to wipe the floor with disk speed anyway, but by concentrating on storage size rather than speed the disk vendors could probably beat flash on price/GB indefinitely.
They could probably bring out a 5TB disk at the same price as a 1TB drive today. A bit slower in seeks, but perfect for video or other large storage.
racks are standard of a lot of other cases too.
i personally prefer the pseudo-screws on my cooler master case. just slide the drive in and twist 2 knobs to lock it in.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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!
You should be like the Brits, have both systems simultaneously, although proper measures are passing out of fashion with the younger generation. You should be able to convert between them in your head anyway.
That was funny!!
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
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.
Well I just spec'd out a system that matches (and in many cases surpasses) this $2800 Mac Pro, http://store.apple.com/AppleStore/WebObjects/BizCustom.woa/9794008/wo/YvG4Po3p3yxA2wHk7uDuP4Rzytr/1.?p=0 , and it cost me all of 1300 dollars. So the question becomes, what's that 1500 premium buying me exactly? Looks like a big fat nothing to me.
That margin is on other development costs, not the hardware. For instance, the operating system...the cost of licensing certain things like patented technology, drivers etc.
Arrogance and backwardness, eh? Whats the advantage of switching to metric, where you have to convert everything to an arbitrary standard, as opposed to a measurement system based on characteristics of the person doing the measuring? I don't care that a HD is so many millions of Cesium wavelengths across, I care that its about 2.5 x the distance of 1 knuckle on my thumb. I can directly perceive and measure THAT distance, all the metric system does is swap one arbitrary measure for another.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
OS X, a nicely made case, a well tested set of components (supposedly), direct support for hardware AND software issues from Apple, since they made everything and can't weasel out of support by claiming "it was the other guys stuff that broke!"
You're doing a pretty good job of steering me clear of ever buying anything from Mac. If you were trying to sway me into thinking the $1500 premium is worth something, this is doing a pretty poor job.
Converting in your head is OK when you're buying produce (about two U.S. pounds per KG). But I write computer hardware manuals, and sometimes I have to give things like chassis depth and torque settings. Tricky to do write even with access to conversion software.
Anyway, any conversion is a temptation to invoke Murphy's Law, as the operators of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the crew of Air Canada Flight 143 will testify.
Not if the game programmers have done their job. Why do you think things like the WAD file were invented?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually I was just thinking that these would be the perfect drives for a Lefthand cluster, the biggest problem I've seen with the Lefthand stuff is that the latency of the 7200RPM SATA drives is a real performance drain for certain applications whereas SAS is kind of overkill on the price/performance curve (you're looking at close to real SAN prices since storage dominates the cost of most installations).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
That's not a reasonable comparison. With the Apple (or a comparable Dell, or whatever) you're getting service, support, a system-wide warranty, etc.
I'm not saying home-built systems are better or worse than prebuilt systems but it's silly to compare them. For the record my personal systems are a mix of Macs and home-built boxes. Right tool for the right job. My Mac laptop cost more than my quad-core server with two RAID arrays, but I don't compare them because it doesn't make sense.
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The advantage of the metric system has nothing to do with cesium. (Which U.S. measurement uses too, BTW.) The advantage is that 90% of the planet uses it. Having to convert back and forth is expensive and accident-prone. It also makes U.S. products less competitive.
It may be convenient for you to use your knuckles as a ruler, but I can think of very few applications for which knuckles are a practical measuring tool. And that's assuming that every person has one-inch knuckle spacing — which they don't.
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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Me, I gave up the build your own path when I realized it cost me money to build it myself (that was 4 years ago). I got my dad a 2.8Ghz Dual core w/ 1 GB RAM & a 19" LCD for $400 2 months ago, covered by a 1 year warranty. Even if I could save $100 buying the cheapest components I could (which I doubt), its not worth my headaches and time to deal with.
Considering I've spec'd out comparable systems with parts from Newegg and Frys that cost anywhere from 50% to 66% the Mac Pro, I'd say they have a pretty hefty margin.Admittedly, Apple's pricing model starts aggressive then fades as component prices drop and their prices hold steady, but you're clearly talking out your ass. Apple sells an 8-core Dual Xeon system for $2,800, two 2.8 Ghz Xeon's are currently priced at $720 each at New Egg, so you hit 50% before you bought a Motherboard ($200 minimum), much less RAM, case, optical drives, power supplies, and video cards. Can you build a PC for less than a Mac Pro? Sure. But the savings aren't that huge anymore.
Yea, you may not want those things but thats what factors in to the cost of the machine.
:D
If thats the case, don't buy one
For a lot of people these are significant advantages over the rest of the industry, even self built machines.
The difference that most of you "home-built" fanatics overlook is that Apple/Dell/HP/whoever are in business to sell and support complete, operating computers, and you are not. You are supplying your own labor, which comprises researching the parts, ordering and receiving the parts, getting the correct drivers for all of those parts, assembling the computer, and installing/configuring the OS and applications. I know exactly what is involved -- I've done it several times myself. But I have concluded that it is not worth my time in dealing with the headache of doing this. It's well worth the premium to receive a pre-built computer that you just hook-up and turn on, and is guaranteed to "just work" (at least in Apple's case). This applies especially for those that are not uber-geeks.
Tell you what, give me the price you will sell your home-built system for, but only if you are able to build and ship 10,000 of them, and provide complete support for them. You have to think through all of the costs associated with that. In fact, you won't be able to determine your real costs until you've done a few hundred of them.
What motherboard and case did you use ?
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
quantum tried going back to 5.25 inch a while back (pentium era), the drives were cheap for thier capacity but flopped anyway.
For normal hard drives capacity is going up much faster than speed so I don't think further trading off speed for capacity would appeal to most users.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
There's no use even making the comparison. You buy what you want because it makes sense for you. Other people buy Mac Pros (or Dells, HPs, or whatever) because they want the warranty, tech support, dealer network, etc. Apple just doesn't see folks like you as part of its market.
it's just whoever happens to have modpoints on the day you post.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This makes a lot of sense.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
You failed to read what I wrote. I said I have a Mac laptop. I have not attempted to "justify" anything and most certainly don't "have to." I don't have a Mac Pro and really don't care if you or anybody else buy one or not.
But comparing a pre-built system to a build-your-own is silly. I saved a lot of money when I built my own server but it also took hours of my time. It wasn't worth it to me to pay somebody else to build and support my server but I understand basic economics so I understand where that price difference goes.
For some people, paying a company $800 dollars to build and support a workstation that will essentially require zero expertise to deploy is worth it. For other people (and this includes me, much of the time) it isn't.
Let me ask you a question: how much is your time worth?
I reckon I've spent a good 10-20 hours dicking around with my most recent PC workstation that I built myself, if you include the initial build+install and a few hardware issues I sorted out over the past year or two.
That's mostly time I'd have back if I'd spent an extra $800 on a Mac Pro. $800 divided by 10 or 20 hours comes out to about $40 to $80 an hour. That's pretty much what a mid-level software engineer can make an hour if (it's a big "if," obviously) they've got work. So I'm still glad I built it myself but it wasn't exactly the financial coup of the century.
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Seems that the unusual connector location on the Velociraptors prevent them from being installed in a Mac Pro.
What components did you use? Because when I did it I got this:
Intel Xeon E5440 Harpertown 2.83GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80574E5440P - Retail $719.00
Intel BOXD5400XS Dual LGA 771 Skulltrail D5400XS Extended ATX Motherboard - Retail $619.99
Going the Intel path we're already over $2000 just for the motherboards and CPUs.
Let's try AMD's equivalent:
AMD Opteron 2356 Barcelona 2.3GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 2MB L3 Cache Socket F 75W Quad-Core Processor - OEM $685.00
TYAN S2915WA2NRF-E Dual 1207(F) NVIDIA nForce Professional 3600 + 3050 SSI / Extended ATX Server Motherboard - Retail $489.99
With the AMD we're saving a grand total of $200 over Intel.
Now let's look at the rest of the components:
Wow.. Radeon 2600 XTs are cheap: $100
Kingston 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) ECC Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit Server Memory Model KVR800D2E5K2/2G - Retail $49.99
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3320613AS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $79.99
LG 20X DVD Burner Black SATA Model GH20NS10 - OEM $25
Thermaltake ArmorPlus(Armor+) VH6000BWS Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Retail $199.99
Thermaltake TR2 RX W0136RU ATX12V Ver2.2 500W Power Supply - Retail $85
Intel Total: $2600
AMD Total: $2400
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Personally, I go exclusively low-end, and at that end of the market Dell doesn't seem to offer anything decent. I've bought a couple of $400-$500 computers (monitor not included) from Dell and found them to be inexplicably anemic, given their specs. I can build a pretty nice computer out of $400 worth of components, but a $400 Dell runs like a cheap POS.
The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that Dell assumes anyone paying less than $500 for a computer won't know or care how it performs. That's just a guess. I really have no clue why it is, but as long as I am using fairly low-end PCs, I will stick with building.
Installing an OS isn't a headache at all these days -- it's almost entirely automated and takes half an hour. The headache is in installing and configuring all of the software you use on a daily basis, copying data onto the computer, and configuring the environment the way you want it. Dell and Apple are absolutely no help in that way. Buying a computer with Windows pre-installed is actually worse than installing Windows yourself, since you typically get an install cluttered up with unnecessary junk, including a bunch of proprietary configuration programs that aren't any better than the ones included with Windows.
And if you aren't going to run Windows or OSX, then Dell and Apple obviously don't offer anything at all except a hardware warranty, which is a rip-off. It's cheaper to just buy hardware with a good reputation for reliability and immediately return anything that's DOA.
The only situations where I see it being worthwhile to buy rather than build are: