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."

Compared to solid state?

[Ed Avis]

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?

Re:

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Yeah it's a shame since I like to watch my hard disks fry. Clearly, you enjoy watching your laptop fry as well.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Sivar]

Power usage = heat.

From the StorageReview.com article [storagereview.com]:

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.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:

[adisakp]

That 9 watt figure is for spinup power which doesn't really contribute to overall heat for the drive considering spinup takes a second or two.

What you want to know is idle and seek power for the VelociRaptor which is 4.2/6.9W. The 3.5" WD GP has an idle power which is lower at 3.8W and a seek power which is higher at 7.6W. What you can see from the charts is that the VelociRaptor is indeed low powered compared to most drives and should only generate marginally more heat than a 3.5 WD GP.

However, that t

Re:Compared to solid state?

[adisakp]

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.

Re:

[CastrTroy]

Friction also equals heat. I imagine that a hard drive spinning at 10,000 RPM would generate quite a bit of friction.

Re:

[Random Destruction]

Friction also equals heat. I imagine that a hard drive spinning at 10,000 RPM would generate quite a bit of friction.

no. input energy = heat.

more friciton = more input energy, so theres no reason to look any further than how much energy it consumes, no matter what your thoughts are on high RPM platters.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Heat may be a problem because it's being emitted from a much smaller case, probably needs to get rid of twice as much power per unit of surface area even if it consumes less power than a 3.5" drive.

Re:

[Sivar]

That is an excellent point. For servers in particular, the Raptor's heat density is probably greater than that of a 3.5" drive, which matters if it has lots of drives. For a regular user with 1 or 2 drives though, it's supposed to be a very cool-running drive.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[SD-Arcadia]

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 [tomshardware.com]

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It's NOT a notebook drive. It's a 2.5" server hard drive put into a funky heat sink, presumably so it would work fine in desktop systems where the system designer or the owner might not have considered proper cooling, or to simplify cooling requirements.

Re:

[aliquis]

I still can't understand how this can be faster than a 3.5" 10krpm drive at the same density?

At first I thought that maybe they had put two 2.5" drives in there.. Maybe even in a 5 1/4" case. Imagine say 4 drives in that case using raid configuration or whatever.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It's not the same areal density. It's higher. I think the Raptor X uses like 4-6 platters, and I think this story says they use 2 platters.

As it is, the 2.5" server drives do get faster access times than the closest 3.5" drives of the same RPM, I think in part because the head arm is shorter (less rotational inertia) and doesn't need to swing as far. Higher areal density helps get higher transfer rates.

Re:

[aliquis]

You can't compare it with an old drive. I just expect them to be able to make similair density in current gen drives no matter what platter size. (may the arm control or something limit it somewhat more on a 3.5" drive)

Yeah, I assume access time / round are the same but as you say "swinging distance" are shorter on a 2.5" drive. Only reason I can see why access times would get lower. But beyond that I would assume a 3.5" drive at 10krpm to be able to have similair data density and therefor own this a lot in

Re:

[Agripa]

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.

Consumer electronics manufacturers often design products to preclude stacking by using a rounded or irregular top because of heat dissipation requirements. It would not surprise me if WD had the same sort of thought for this drive because almost all existing laptops are not designed to handle the power dissipation of 10K RPM

Laptop drive?

[danielsfca2]

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.

Re:

[Yetihehe]

Please RTFA. It is 2.5" drive (only a little taller) mounted on 3.5" massive heat sink (IcePAK).

Re:

[PopeRatzo]

So you're saying that even though the laptop CPU will still melt my sperm, my wiener won't burn to a crisp???

Can you fit it in the PCMCIA slot?

If you're caught, be sure to blame the mess on ghosts' ectoplasm.

Re:

[giverson]

2.5" != laptop drive. Many SAS drives are 2.5" but they won't fit in a laptop anytime soon.

Re:

[Sivar]

Power usage is 60% lower than any drive ever encountered [storagereview.com] (see earlier post). Apparently the huge heatsink is epoxied (or something like that) onto the drive. Not very bright on WD's part, unless I'm missing something.

The enterprise version is supposed to use a standard connector, so those who want their laptop disk IO to outperform most desktops, including most RAID0 arrays, may be able to use those.
For reliability, I have an old 74GB Raptor that's still working fine, but StorageReview's reliability benchma

Re:Laptop drive?

[mcpkaaos]

When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive?

It is not a laptop drive. Here, take a gander [hothardware.com].

I assume the power requirements would be intense though

According to TFA, the Velociraptor consumes the least power [hothardware.com] out of the drives compared (all WD, including a Raptor 150).

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 had 1 drive out of over 20 fail on me in the last 6 years, all made by WD (including several Raptors, which run hot as hell but never seem to skip a beat). The one WD drive that did fail did so only after 3+ years of constant usage in a server.

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 [nongnu.org] out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Re:Laptop drive?

[michrech]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

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.

Re:

[raw-sewage]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

[...]

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 don't doubt the ac

Re:

[mobby_6kl]

Wow, a 90% failure rate within 6 month surely doesn't leave any drives functioning after more than a couple of years. Well my WD800JB is still just fine after more than five years of almost continuous usage, so obviously you're full of it, right?

> I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives.

Yeah, and there are also people like you with their unsupported anecdotes, and then there are large scale studies, like that done by google, which say that while some m

Re:Laptop drive?

[mobby_6kl]

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.

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 :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 [westerndigital.com]). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.

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. [sunrise.ru] It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. [sunrise.ru] 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.

-----------

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?

Re:

[Z34107]

"Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800..."

Personally, I use some WD40 on my WD400 to reduce axial friction. Although seek latency, power consumption, and heat were all reduced, I had to replace the drive due to data loss.

Crappy WD drives...

Re:

[aliquis]

Less power than a normal 3.5" drive, probably much for a 2.5" drive.

Re:

[camperslo]

Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop.
At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.

It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer.
You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive

Re:

[moosesocks]

The "guts" are mostly similar to a 3.5" desktop drive, although the platters themselves have a 2.5" diameter, reducing the rotational inertia, weight, and surface area of said platters, allowing the drive to spin faster, and with less power.

Similarly, smaller platters also allow for faster seek times.

Re:

[aliquis]

As if WD drives would be more unreliable than anything else? It also has 5 years warranty (which doesn't mean that it will survive longer, but anyway.)

Noise Level

[MankyD]

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.

Re:

[Rakeris]

I have one, and it's very quite. It's makes about the same amount of noise as my 500GB samsung. The only difference is it makes a bit of light "clicking" whenever it's doing a lot of reading/writing.

Re:

[skiflyer]

Next to my 7800gt fan I don't even hear the two raptors I have clicking away.

Re:

[mad zambian]

I use a striped pair of 36GB Raptors for my system disk. (Data disk is 3 drive RAID 5) Speed is great, but the little brutes do need active cooling, and are anything but quiet. Maybe it is the pair of them doing synchronous seeks that make them so noisy, who knows? They are the noisiest disks I have used since a pair of 250MB Connors about 15 years ago. Happy with them? Oh hell yes. Next computer will have the same setup, but much more noise damping.

Re:Noise Level

[Sivar]

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.

Re:

[Amouth]

i love the orginal 10k drive.s. i have a 36gb IBM 10k SCSI drive.. and man it is like a jet engine.. but sadly it is quite comparied to the 9.1gb 15k SCSI drives i have in one of the rack boxes.. when that box turns off the room is silent .. even though there is the whole of the rack still going..

More interesting review

[Sivar]

The review is up on on StorageReview.com [storagereview.com]. You can use the database [storagereview.com] to compare this drive to every other drive out there in different kinds of tasks.

Re:

[Vigile]

Some of the other reviews to check out:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=548&pid=2 [pcper.com]
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583 [techreport.com]
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever [maximumpc.com]

1 GB/$, ouch

[rubeng]

It's a little better than the current Raptors' [diskcompare.com] 0.88 GB/$, but nowhere close to the 6.25 GB/$ for a Samsung Spinpoint F1 [diskcompare.com]. 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.

Re:

[corychristison]

I have always believed that is why RAID0 has been so popular.

You get better performance, bigger drive, and it's only pitfall is that if one drive dies, then they are both pretty toast.

Re:

[michrech]

I always looked at it this way: If you have one really nice/fast drive and it fails, you *still* lose everything you had. I'd rather spend the same (or less) cash on two slightly smaller, slower drives and throw them into an array...

I have always believed that is why RAID0 has been so popular.

You get better performance, bigger drive, and it's only pitfall is that if one drive dies, then they are both pretty toast.

Re:

[Sivar]

Backups are still a good idea though. Accidental deletion, corrupt filesystem, and all that can still eat your data. Not that I've ever done this ...
RAID1 also improves performance for reads somewhat compared to a single drive (though for writes, it is slightly slower unfortunately, plus you only get the space of one drive).

Re:

[pyite]

I always looked at it this way: If you have one really nice/fast drive and it fails, you *still* lose everything you had. I'd rather spend the same (or less) cash on two slightly smaller, slower drives and throw them into an array...

Yes but the point is that with N drives striped without parity (i.e. RAID 0), you increase your probability of disastrous failure proportionally to N.

Re:

[dfn_deux]

Say that 1 expensive drive has a reliability rating of 2u (arbitrary units, where higher is better) and you are advocating using two cheaper drives with a reliability of 1u each, then striping them gives a combined reliability of 1u/2 or .5u... maybe you get performance approaching the 1 expensive disk but at a cost of 75% reliability. Realistically the target market for these drives is deploying them in arrays with parity and spares. I personally don't see any performance increase when going to 2 drives vs

Re:

[Sivar]

RAID isn't going to give you better performance than this Raptor other than in STR (sustained transfer rate, like copying large files or streaming HD video). STR is about worthless for desktop computers, though RAID0 does improve performance for other things a bit.

Just, not as much as people seem to think when they read a misleading benchmark written by some dope that thinks HDTach and Atto are worth the floppy disks they're installed from. (They are great tools for what they do, just, they are misu

Re:

[dfghjk]

You apparently know nothing about RAID.

Access time

[tinkerghost]

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 - an

Re:

[afidel]

Actually modern RAID1/10 setups can decrease access times by dispatching reads to the drive that has a head nearest the data being requested.

Re:

[afidel]

For many applications rotational latency still matters, so yes you get more GB/$ but you have worse performance profile for some apps. You also have to consider duty cycle. I believe the Raptors are rated for a more server like duty cycle whereas that drive is probably rated only for a desktop duty cycle.

Re:

[Tumbleweed]

Gee, a super-fast drive costs more per gigabyte than a normal drive. Who woulda thunk it?

You should read some reviews of cars just to make sure a Ferrari costs more per mph than, say, a Ford Focus.

Re:

[Sivar]

Mod this AC up! He knows what he's talking about.

Although RAID0 does offer some performance benefit for desktop systems, it's very limited in the real world, but it absolutely kicks ass for STR-heavy stuff like video editing.

Re:

[CharlieHedlin]

We use 8 Raptor drives with a 3ware 9550 controller in raid 10. The performance is spectacular (moving from a software mirror of two raptors to this cut many of our data processing jobs by 60-70%.)

Unfortunately these new drives won't fit in our case (which has 12 hot swap bays).

Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps

[MosesJones]

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.

Re:

[danielsfca2]

niiiiiice. I see what you did there.

Re:

[a_nonamiss]

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.

Wow... we're almost performing up to the level we were at in 1989.

Re:

[MP3Chuck]

I know you're trying to be funny, but there is such a thing [anandtech.com]. :)

Re:

[PingPongBoy]

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

Talking about speed, this is an effective design. Multiple UPS and a separate computer that maintains the RAM will give reliability. Not sure if it's worth it just to boot faste

Re:

[Agripa]

Does anyone have any ideas about multiple heads? If the heads are swinging independently, the mechanics are quite complex, but what if the heads all swing in unison - all together at the same direction and speed? Then the heads can spend less time per cylinder. Heads can also be given a positional offset in order to be on different cylinders at the same time. Complex mechanics, but in today's level of technology, par for the course as the saying goes. Even a slower RPM drive can still have the performance o

Re:

[elmartinos]

Ever tried to reboot a system where *all* its data, including the operating system itself, is stored in RAM?

So sad

[TheLink]

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.

Raptors? Run!

[Nushio]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors [xkcd.com]...

Re:

[StarfishOne]

You're definitely not the only one. First thing I did after seeing this news title in the RSS feed was to wonder: is the data secure?!?

http://xkcd.com/87/ [xkcd.com]

Re:Raptors? Run! - apologies to Yakov Smirnoff..

[CdBee]

In corporate America, geeks consume Velociraptors..

Re:

[CastrTroy]

My highschool physics teacher used to put Keanu Reeves and speeding buses into a lot of his questions. Made things a little more interesting.

I have no confidence in anything from WD

[jskline]

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 mak

Re:I have no confidence in anything from WD

[moosesocks]

Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty [wdc.com].

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.

Re:

[Spy Handler]

I've had 3 Western Digital drives in the past 5 years and they are all still working, no problems.

I don't doubt you've had yours die on you; hard drives fail sometimes. But I don't know that WD are any more prone to failure than other brands. (maybe they are, I just don't know)

IBM Deathstars (now Hitachi) on the other hand, I've heard a lot about.

Re:

[jskline]

I like that "IBM Deathstars"... I had some of those early ones with a lot of faults--especially getting quite hot enough to melt plastic surroundings when they get older than a year!! Hitachi's I've not had much issue with but the branded IBM's from Hitachi were a problem. Toshiba and Seagates that I've had were quite stellar. No problems at all with them.

Re:

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The enterprise WDs don't seem to have that problem.

I have a couple desktop WDs that are over 1.5 years old and they're still running fine.

Re:

[JBMcB]

I've noticed that of all my machines, the one I built myself has the longest MTBF as far as hard drives go. I'm pretty sure it's because the drive cage has a dedicated fan, keeping electromechanical devices cool greatly increases their lifespan.

Re:

[spagthorpe]

Sorry for your experiences, but they don't match mine very well. I've had a long list of WD drives for years, and only recently retired two 250GB drives that had basically continual use over the last four years or so. I gave them to a friend, that is still using them without issue. I have not had a single WD drive fail on me.

When I replaced those drives, I did so with WD's new lower power GP drives, and have had no problem with them at all. Super quiet and seem (without actual benchmarks to back this up) fa

Get yourself a better supplier or transport ..

[freaker_TuC]

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 ha

Re:

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:Has only one application

[Colonel Korn]

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.

Re:Has only one application

[dfghjk]

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%.

Re:

[Sivar]

The 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 is $675.00 at Dell (source: Google [google.com], while the Raptor is (supposedly) about $300.

That's 2.25 times the cost per megabyte.

According to this performance database [storagereview.com] (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

Re:

[MrNaz]

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.

Re:

[Sivar]

You obviously haven't used one. The TRex drive requires a separate room [data-mountain.co.uk] 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!

Re:

[WiglyWorm]

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.

You missed "NON-STANDARD CONNECTOR"

[Chas]

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.

Re:

[Firehed]

You could also get three 500GB drives, giving you a terabyte of RAID5 storage. Or just JBOD for the same 1.5TB, which you're still better off doing than RAID0 unless you absolutely need the extra speed (meaning HD video capture, and almost nothing else). Of course 750GB drives are starting at $120 these days, so you can head to 2.25TB for $360. Blah blah blah.

The only really nice thing about having that kind of speed in a single self-contained drive is not having to futz with RAID support at an OS level,

Re:

[MozeeToby]

Exactly how important is this data that you haven't needed for the past 5 years?

Re:

[Charcharodon]

I've had 3 drives fail on me in ten years. Two were maxtor's one was a WD. The Maxtor's failed within 3 months, the WD was DOA, even so they were my favorite companies for price. I'm sure if I had gone with seagate or any of the others I would have had similar experiences.

If you opperate under the following rules your life will be much easier.

1 - Any drive that lasts 1 month with most likely last six

2 - Any drive that lasts 6 months will most likely last till it's obsolete (3 years)

3 - Any d

Re:

[CharlieHedlin]

Last time I lost a hard drive due to a controller (only 60 days after purchase) I got the warranty replacement, swapped the controller, imaged the old drive, swapped the controllers back (so all the serial numbers would match), restored the image to the new drive, and returned the old.

It took 1 day, but only about 30 minutes of my time.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

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.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

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.

I do the exact same thing in my PC. It's called a hard drive rack. You can buy them for around 23 dollars on Newegg.

Re:

[mrsteveman1]

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.

Re:

[compro01]

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.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

Yea but on a mac pro, the drives are out of the way and the rack is standard.

Yeah it's standard but you're paying a hefty premium I'm not. I can buy 5 of those racks for my case and I'm still saving quite a ton of money over your Mac Pro which can be put into use to buy other things.

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.

Maybe if you buy a really cheap and cramped PC tower. On mine I don't lose much of any space. Besides if I did need more space the internal drive tower is detachable in my case by simply unscrewing the thumb screws. So in the end you've gained nothing over what I can do in my case and you've paid p

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

Actually, if you price a Mac Pro vs. a similarly spec'd workstation from Dell, the Apple frequently comes in a few dollars cheaper.

That's not really saying much to me as I don't buy anything from Dell. I build my own PCs and cut out the middleman markups.

Apple really does not have a high margin on base Mac Pros, ie without the ridiculous memory upgrade costs.

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.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

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 [apple.com] , 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.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do]

OS X

Don't want. So that's no added value to me. I run Debian on all my boxes.

a nicely made case,

Not really. The case I chose was in many was much better looking and more offered more space for upgrades than the one they are selling at least from looking at the pictures they offer.

a well tested set of components (supposedly),

Except in the case of the component being explicitly stated I got the exact same thing. So that's no advantage for Apple. In fact that's just highlighting just how much they are trying to rip me off.

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!"

This is the only thing remotely approaching wo

Re:

[Demolition]

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.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

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.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[PopeRatzo]

Uh, actually, hard drive upgrades are easier in the Mac Pro than in any other computer I have ever owned.

You didn't mention that your other computers were DEC Alphas and PDP-3's.

Re:

[compro01]

1. for the drive, it's a fairly nice case design to work in. some of the cheap POS cases i've worked with make installing a new drive a pain, literally in many cases (sharp edges), though i've also seen nicer cases to work in.

2. i dunno what's he on about with the memory either, unless he's thinking of the cases with overly tight tolerances, resulting in the side panel being difficult to remove, but i keep a large flathead screwdriver in my toolkit for that very reason and it hasn't failed me yet.

Re:

[Znork]

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

Re:

[fm6]

OK, silly nitpick I have to raise every time we talk about traditional versus metric measures: the U.S. has never used Imperial units. That system was invented in the 1820s, when the U.S. had long since ceased to be part of "The Empire". The U.S. uses something called "Customary Units" which is a collection of English units that were common at the time the U.S. declared independence. Most of the common unit names are the same, and some of the definitions are the same (or at least equivalent), but the system

Re:

[toddestan]

Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.