Question about WD Raptor Replacements

[bobmitch]

Hi...

I currently have two 74 GB WD Raptors on RAID 0...and am running out of room. Both drives are approaching five years old and have worked flawlessly in RAID 0 for all that time. Now the question...what to purchase to replace them:

1. Two Raptor X's to run in RAID 0. Right now, my two 74's benchmark with HD Tach around 150 at the top and 80 at the bottom...and I imagine that the 150's will benchmark around the same. I can get the two 150's for around $300 with tax included.

2. Wait for the new VelociRaptor drive (300 GB) that benchmarks around 120 top and 75 bottom as a single drive...This drive is supposed to hit the retail channel this month at $300...so pricing is the same.

What to do? So many choices. Granted...option 2 looks enticing if I have the money, down the road to pick up a second drive like it and run RAID...speed might be obscene...but right now limited $$$

Thoughts?

Thanks

Bob

[spookyload]

If you are worried about benchmarking performance and speed, wait a year for the solid state harddrives to drop a little then you will be saying "Raptor what?"

[zman88]

What about just installing another drive for now and using it to clean out some stuff from the raid drives ? Use them till they blow, maybe by that time the solid state will be alot cheaper.

[ctal]

You may also want to consider the recently introduced WD 640 gB drive, which achieves extremely fast transfer rates by using two very dense (320 gB) platters. It's seek times are considerably slower than the Raptor's, of course. It's only $90 at NewEgg right now (edit: the price just went up $20 in the few minutes since I started writing this post, meaning that a $20 "instant discount" went away!):

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives.

I have the 150 gB Raptor and two WD640's in my new system (described in my profile), all connected as single drives. HD Tune gives the following benchmarks:

150 gB Raptor: 85/74/55 max/avg/min mB/s; 8 ms access; 116 mB/s burst

(The minimum of 55 mB/s ignores a brief downward spike to 39 that occurs near the beginning of the drive)

WD640 no. 1: 109/87/52; 12.7; 153

WD640 no. 2: 113/91/53; 12.2; 152

Access times always seem to measure considerably slower with HDTune than the manufacturer's specs; I'm not sure why that is.

Regards,

-- Al

[bobmitch]

Thanks for the input...adding a third drive might actually be an option...

Thanks

[bobmitch]

ctal

By the looks of things...the speeds of your 640's are actually FASTER than the Raptor. If that is real...why Raptors? The only real disadvantage of a NON Raptor is slower access speed...not sure that is really a big deal. It actually takes two older Raptors to be faster where you get 145/110/70. I wonder what two of those bad boys would do RAID???

Bob

[CK8-04]

The beauty of the Raptors is their access time. If you wanted to open 1000 1kb files, the Raptor would smoke the 640AAKS. On the contrary, if you wanted to open a 1GB file, the 640AAKS would smoke the Raptor. Transfer rates don't mean everything; access time plays a big role in speed as well. Having said that, HDTach is only a synthetic benchmark and says very little about the drive's actual performance. I suggest you do some real time benchmarking with a stopwatch and see the real (or lack of) differences in performance. IMHO, the difference in performance between a 7200 RPM drive vs. a 10K RPM drive isn't as big as a 5400 RPM drive vs. a 7200 RPM drive (law of diminishing returns anyone?). If I were to buy a drive today, the 640AAKS would be my choice.

[ctal]

Yes, CK8-04 puts it well. The bottom line depends on the uses the particular drive will be put to.

On my secondary drives I store mainly large video files (which can be MANY gB each), so sequential transfer rate is more important than access (seek) time. Therefore I'm using the WD640 drives, which by the way have faster transfer rates basically because they are a couple of generations or so more recent than the Raptor's in terms of data density.

For a system drive, access time obviously becomes much more important, and I don't need anywhere near 640gB of space for that drive, so I've chosen the Raptor. But it's hard to say for sure whether that or the 640 would produce overall a subjectively snappier feel in a system drive application. And other factors such as noise levels and cost would certainly favor the 640.

Regards,
-- Al