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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."
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
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
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
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.
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
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 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.
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)
Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty.
I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.
I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.
If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.
The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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!
Yeah, cause plugging in the power cable and then connecting the SATA cable to the motherboard is just such a hard task. I'm surprised anyone is able to muster the enormous amount of skill that's required by such a task.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Exactly. It would only be flamebait if you posted something like :
Mac: Hey PC, what are you doing?
PC: Playing a video game.
Mac: Which one?
PC: All of them.
I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems ;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.
:D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.
Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...
The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.
Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately
I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.
I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.
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From another reply:
> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...
Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?