2CPU.com » News » December 2003 » Western Digital

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

02/11/2003 05:59 AM: Western Digital's official announcement of the 10K SATA drives. by dadmin
Western Digital have posted the official press release dealing with the new 10,000 rpm SATA drives.Expected to be shipping later this month, the WD Raptor hard drive is expected to sell for approximat...

08/09/2001 09:55 PM: Western Digital Caviar WD1000BB Review @ Storage Review... by Jim
Storage Review is at it again; this time with Western Digital's latest creation, their 100GB, 7200rpm Caviar 1000BB. Overall, Western Digital's latest drive is a package that's hard to beat. It delive...

burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20

#25449 Posted on: 12/16/2003 08:11 PM 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

NerdZero Registered User Posts: 197 Joined: 2003-03-11

#25450 Posted on: 12/16/2003 09:20 PM I was surprised to see that the 4, 5, and 6 drive RAID 0 configs were all pretty evenly matched.

burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20

#25451 Posted on: 12/16/2003 09:37 PM 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

mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18

#25452 Posted on: 12/16/2003 09:48 PM $300 per drive. You can get scsi at that price.

burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20

#25453 Posted on: 12/16/2003 09:52 PM 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

Slick_nic Registered User Posts: 34 Joined: 2002-08-22

#25454 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:06 PM 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)

mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18

#25455 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:18 PM Originally posted by burmese 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. Reliability and expandability are what im looking for. SATA is still not proven in the business i deal with. Also tough to have more than 12 drives in a subsystem with SATA.

burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20

#25456 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:28 PM 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

mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18

#25457 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:34 PM Originally posted by burmese 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. You would be surprised how cost wary some companies are. Even when it comes to serving thousands of customers if there is a way to cut costs they will do it.

burmese Registered User Posts: 186 Joined: 2002-01-20

#25458 Posted on: 12/16/2003 10:52 PM 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

mekboy Registered User Posts: 744 Joined: 2001-11-18

#25459 Posted on: 12/16/2003 11:14 PM Originally posted by burmese 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. I agree with you but we all know how SLOW the enterprise market adopts new products. As of present i can't find to many faults with SATA.

CWJ717 Registered User Posts: 36 Joined: 2003-08-19

#25460 Posted on: 12/17/2003 10:03 AM 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.

cjcox Titus 3:5 Posts: 1396 Joined: 2002-09-19

#25461 Posted on: 12/17/2003 10:37 AM 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

Forge Titus 3:5 Posts: 720 Joined: 2001-05-12

#25462 Posted on: 12/17/2003 02:14 PM 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)

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