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Western Digital
Posted by: Jim on: 12/16/2003 03:04 PM [ Print | 14 comment(s) ]
GamePC has busted out six of Western Digital's latest Raptor drive, the WD740GD, and combined those with an LSI MegaRAID-6 SATA controller for some RAID lovin'.
So why is the Raptor so popular, and why has the market made such a fuss for the upcoming 74GB variant of this drive? I can tell you from first hand experience. Speed. Western Digital Raptor drives best the competition in terms of raw transfer rates by 10% or more, making them great candidates for OS/application drives, which constantly need quick access to data. In addition, gamers love Raptors as they decrease long level load times in very visible ways. Couple a few of them together in RAID-0 and you
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« Intel buys Opteron Servers? · Western Digital
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burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20 |
![]() Pages 8 and 9 show the differences between the 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI bus and the 64-bit, 66 MHz bus. Those slots on the K8W go faster, I believe, but the LSI controller was limited to 66 MHz. I know what the theoretical limits on the Athlon MPX chipset roughly are but not sure about the K8W. ~\_/~\_O Burmese |
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NerdZero Registered User Posts: 197 Joined: 2003-03-11 |
![]() I was surprised to see that the 4, 5, and 6 drive RAID 0 configs were all pretty evenly matched. |
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burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20 |
![]() It would have been interesting to see how a set of slower drives would scale. Whether they also leveled out or continued to scale upwards would clue us in on whether the controller's limits were being hit with the new Raptors. ~\_/~\_O Burmese |
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mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18 |
![]() $300 per drive. You can get scsi at that price. |
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burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20 |
![]() Those Raptors beat any 10k SCSI drives (see recent reviews at Storagereview.com) so you'd have to buy $500 15k SCSI drives to equal or better that performance. ~\_/~\_O Burmese |
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Slick_nic Registered User Posts: 34 Joined: 2002-08-22 |
![]() Would be nice to see some other controllers in there as the reviewer seamed dissapointed by the LSI's performance. I also thought it was a little strange to mix software and hardware to make the RAID-50 array, IMHO the small gain in write performance didnt justify the loss in space. I remember a good roundup of IDE (P-ATA) raid controllers a while ago (was linked from 2cpu but cant remember where to), would be nice to see somthing similar with these S-ATA Raptors. 2x Opteron 270, Tyan K8WE, 2Gb Ram, ATI X1800XL, 4x 300Gb Maxtor D'max 10's (RAID 5) |
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mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18 |
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burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20 |
![]() Well then there is no point noting cost differences? The Raptors could cost $50 and outperform a set of $5,000 SCSI drives but won't be part of any buying decisions. As an aside, note that a pair of 3-Ware 8506-12 controllers can handle 24 SAT drives. ~\_/~\_O Burmese |
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mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18 |
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burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20 |
![]() The WD drives come with a 5-yr warrantee, comparable to any SCSI drive. The basic physical drives are the same as their SCSI counterparts. With a company like Adaptec putting out SATA controllers they are willing to describe as being targeted towards 'Enterprise' solutions I'd start to consider SATA to be in the 'safe' zone now. Some subtle bugs in various vendors' driver software may yet bubble to the surface but at some point in 2004 it should be safe to consider SATA RAID in a mission-critical 365/24/7 environment. ~\_/~\_O Burmese |
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mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18 |
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CWJ717 Registered User Posts: 36 Joined: 2003-08-19 |
![]() burmese: Faster? Maybe for desktop performance. From storagereview.com: These two SR Server DriveMarks, a weighted average of a drive's performance under varying load levels, demonstrate that though it offers significantly superior multi-user performance when contrasted to 7200 RPM drives and though it also improves upon its predecessor, without command queuing the WD740GD can not keep pace with today's 10,000 RPM units. |
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cjcox Titus 3:5 Posts: 1396 Joined: 2002-09-19 |
![]() The latest raptor is impressive... however, as SATA becomes commodity, look for the warranty to drop back to 1 year (warning) again. Also, over the next few months look to see some Serial Attached SCSI drives come out... they'll easily displace this raptor. The SATA raptor just can't match the fast access times of their older SCSI brethren, look for SAS drives to deliver better performance overall combined with long warranties and fast access times. But... if you need to get something today, the raptor looks to be a good choice and the long warranty is nice. HP-xw6600/2x2.83Ghz-E5440/4G/10K-160G-SATA/300G-SATA/7600GT/BluRayRW/openSUSE-11.1 HP-2530p/2.13GhzCore2/4G/1x160G/Intel4500MHD/DVD-RW/openSUSE-11.1 Custom/2xX5550/12G/2x300G-10K-Raptor/NVS295/DVDRW/ESX-4.0 Custom/2x6128HE/32G/4x2TB/onboard/Blueray/SLES11SP1-KVM |
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Forge Titus 3:5 Posts: 720 Joined: 2001-05-12 |
![]() Actually, I believe the SATA Caviar drives (commodity) are 1 year already, though they might be 3 year. Only the Raptors get 5 years. Registered Linux user 82133 (li.org has a short memory) |