raptor day is numbered.

[bberson]

"Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb

So is the subject wishful thinking, a troll, or simply un-informed?

At five times the cost of a discounted Raptor, fifteen percent less storage capacity, thirty percent less maximum STR (read rate - A-Data suspiciously omitted mention of write speeds), no mention of durability, and a truly borderline difference in power requirements, I can't see any substantial or immediate threat to consumer, mid-level or enterprise spindles in any market.

At those costs such a device will enjoy only certain niche markets like Citrix servers, where the seek times will translate directly into increased server capacity, or nerds with too much money. Which reminds me... hey Tekzor, wake up 'n smell the coffee. SSDs have been around for years. The only difference is that capacity is becoming more realistic. On the desktop side, Raptors are a far wiser purchasing choice for most folks than are hot, expensive, power hungry SCSI/SAS/FC drives and the expensive HBAs that go with them. No reason for a jealous and poorly-spelled snit.

BTW, Niz, if you think all those registry hits are bad, what's even worse is that in Win2K and later they're non-reentrant. Yech.

-Brad

 

[Guest]

Gaming / Internet / Office it's fine, there are a few exceptions though - IIRC Adobe Photoshop whinges about 'no pagefile detected' if the system has no virtual memory and won't run. There may be other applications like this, but my advice to anyone thinking about it would be to try it and see what happens - you won't break anything on a permanent basis.

 

[clue69less]

what happens when Raptor stops at 150gb production, and the 1.5-3tb drives are out in 2 years?


Then 150gb (regardless of the actual space requirements for the user) will look like a 256mb thumb drive does today.

I'd assume that WD can go beyond 150GB if they choose to. Not sure if they are trying to apply perp to the Raptor or not. I read in an industry mag that WD has tested perp designs but it wasn't specific about where their research was headed. I assume they would have to license the tech from Seagate or whoever owns it.

 

[umala]

Well,

saying the raptors days are numbered technically is correct. But you could say that about anything. Of course, what lies inside of a raptor will be replaced with something else faster eventually. They might still call it a raptor though. So, other than to be a tard and start a little war with raptor fanboys, what was the point of this thread?

Oh yeah, Core 2's days are numbered! :roll: :idea:

Maybe you are a Raptor fanboy and trying to rally support. Saying C2D day is numbered, well. correct but this is what everyone seems to knows because everyone knows that there are new CPU every year perhaps.

The point of this thread is that it seems to me the hdd business is moving to Perpendicular in the next several years ahead and Raptor with 10000 rpm will till rules desktop performance and THAT flash is still limited to notebook, which suffer capacity and performance in exchange for battery saving. That is what I thought before I read that article which shows something that ALL specs are superior to Raptor. The point of this thread is a surprise, if you claim this thread is pointless, please refer to me any thread before this which says that something can be superior than Raptor as hdd for desktop.

For C2D, well, tons of data already shows its day is numbered.

 

[Bloated]

I bought my raptors specifically for speed I have twin 74gb raided and currently have only taken up 24gb of space on the array.

would I even hesitate to pay $200.00 for a 32gb hard drive that is substancially faster in every way..... sure the caveat being it has to be substancially faster in every way.

I'd keep windows on the speedy drive and storage on a seperate drive no biggie.....

that said the tech atm seems far from ready for primetime with alot of questions left unanswered.

 

[cb62fcni]

Well,

saying the raptors days are numbered technically is correct. But you could say that about anything. Of course, what lies inside of a raptor will be replaced with something else faster eventually. They might still call it a raptor though. So, other than to be a tard and start a little war with raptor fanboys, what was the point of this thread?

Oh yeah, Core 2's days are numbered! :roll: :idea:

Maybe you are a Raptor fanboy and trying to rally support. Saying C2D day is numbered, well. correct but this is what everyone seems to knows because everyone knows that there are new CPU every year perhaps.

The point of this thread is that it seems to me the hdd business is moving to Perpendicular in the next several years ahead and Raptor with 10000 rpm will till rules desktop performance and THAT flash is still limited to notebook, which suffer capacity and performance in exchange for battery saving. That is what I thought before I read that article which shows something that ALL specs are superior to Raptor. The point of this thread is a surprise, if you claim this thread is pointless, please refer to me any thread before this which says that something can be superior than Raptor as hdd for desktop.

For C2D, well, tons of data already shows its day is numbered.

Ok, wait, the point of this thread is that the SSHDD's are superior in ALL respects to a Raptor? Are you high? The current drives are still a third slower in read transfer and more than 50% slower in write. Plus, they're 750 dollars more than a 150Gb raptor that has superior performance in all respects other than seek time and power consumption. Power consumption is a pretty much moot issue for a desktop, and increased seek doesn't do a whole hell of a lot of good if the transfer rates can't match the raptor's. I don't think anyone is really a Raptor fanboy, that's ridiculous. That's for CPU's and GPU's. For hard drives, Raptor is the undisputed leader, and has been for quite a few years now. Shame on other companies for not coming up with compteting products.

Perpendicular is great for mass storage, but there isn't a whole hell of a lot of performance gain over traditional HDD's. Not many average users are gonna dump a ton of money on a 1TB HDD when they can get a few 320's for much cheaper. So I think perp. is more an evolutionary rather than revolutionary development.

Shame on you for posting such garbage and then trying to hype it up into something it clearly isn't. If you insist on persisting in your delusions of SSHDD superiority, go do it somewhere else.

edit: typo

 

[umala]

Shame on other companies for not coming up with compteting products.

Shame on you for posting such garbage and then trying to hype it up into something it clearly isn't. If you insist on persisting in your delusions of SSHDD superiority, go do it somewhere else.

I have realised that only you in this thread have shames and a few.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

you all need to shush.
You are comparing products that are not created for the same purpose.


Next time, debate whether or not apples are oranges.

 

[sandmanwn]

what makes you think other companies arent coming up with competing products???

access times are great but it still cant touch the throughput of the raptor.
price is ludacris (5 150GB raptors at the same price)
size is too small
wheres the supply? i cant find any.
128GB was just shown at CES availability when???

perhaps in a year but at 60mb/s its competition is Sata300 not the raptor. And its definitely loosing there with 500-750GB hard drives. You can buy 5/6/7 500GB hard drives for the same price, or 3 750GB.

If it could double its bandwith or at least exceed 100mb/s then it might find a niche market with enthusiasts, that would also depend on its price dropping about 70-80%.

 

[djgandy]

"Solid state drives promise to be much faster than traditional hard drives. Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range. Regular hard drives typically have access times between 8 and 19 ms. In addition, SSDs promise to enhance battery life by a few minutes."
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/01/17/adata_ssd_128gb

A lot of people in this thread have totally missed the point and forgotten a lot of considerations.

Firstly, look at the price of an HD-DVD / Bluray Drive. Very expensive.
Now reminice back to when CD-Writers and DVD Writers came out. They were very expensive. DVD writers are around £20 now, compared to £500 when first released.
This is what happens when a product is first released. It's expensive!

Anyone remember the first hard drives, that had 40meg of space....
...You are writing off a new technology which has the potential to surpass the hard drive before its even had a chance.
Of course it's expensive. But it's justified (kind of). It's very fast compared to what we are used to using and uses a lot less power and space. It's also not in mass production.

128GB is a very impressive amount IMO. I don't doubt that going up further either. The affordable large storage hard drives today are the ~300gb ones. Over that they become expensive per GB.
Considering flash memory hasn't been around quite as long, at least in the commercial form it is today, 128GB is a very rapid development.
Unless fujitsu bring this 3TB drive out, the spinning disk is going to finally get some competition.

People aren't going to keep buying the same drives for years and years.
They will want either more capacity or more performance. I'm not going to be happy when i walk in the shop and buy a hard drive which is identical in both areas to the one i bought 3 years ago unless it's a lot cheaper.

Oh yeah, last thing.

Learn to read the title. "raptor day is numbered" means that in the near future. I'd be seriously surprised if something like this doesn't take over from raptor type drive. Raptors are over priced trash anyway, lets hope this does get in and upgrade that bottleneck in all our pc's. The Hard Drive!

 

[cb62fcni]

The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD comparison isn't completely valid, because that high price tag on your new blu-ray player comes with very real benefits, as in, it outperforms the industry standard in visual performance. The only real benefits to the SSHDD are the quicker access time and the lower power consumption. I.E. this tech is still in its infancy. I'm not coming out and saying it has no potential, clearly it does, but it also clearly has a long way to go before it can compete with regular old mechanical hard drives.

It's not gonna be in the near future either. It'll be at least 5 years before such devices become mainstream, maybe a little sooner in the notebook dept., where they aren't competing against drives like the raptor and the lower power consumption is actually meaningful. And why does everyone insist on trashing the raptor with no justification. It's only the best performing HDD available today. Have you ever used one? It makes a difference in easing that bottleneck, believe me.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

No they dont. Look at the Oppo DVD player review for up conversion. It outperforms current HD-DVD/Blueray movie quality about 85% of the time. Review on THG.

 

[cb62fcni]

It outperforms them because of the shoddy encoding being done with some current titles, not because of the hardware.

 

[djgandy]

The Blu-Ray/HD-DVD comparison isn't completely valid, because that high price tag on your new blu-ray player comes with very real benefits, as in, it outperforms the industry standard in visual performance. The only real benefits to the SSHDD are the quicker access time and the lower power consumption. I.E. this tech is still in its infancy. I'm not coming out and saying it has no potential, clearly it does, but it also clearly has a long way to go before it can compete with regular old mechanical hard drives.

It's not gonna be in the near future either. It'll be at least 5 years before such devices become mainstream, maybe a little sooner in the notebook dept., where they aren't competing against drives like the raptor and the lower power consumption is actually meaningful. And why does everyone insist on trashing the raptor with no justification. It's only the best performing HDD available today. Have you ever used one? It makes a difference in easing that bottleneck, believe me.

Sorry i was looking at it in capacity form not video quality form.
I watched a film from the 1960's the other day, and tbh, me and my dad were taking the piss. "was this shot in HD?" I'm not really interested in that marketed rubbish tbh . That's not why i'd need HD Media.

EDIT: Also to clear up some confusion, i was simply using that as an example of prices of technology falling over time. Nothing is cheap from the start.

Anyway thats not the point. The point was, when something new comes on the market it is always expensive. Thats why i made the blu ray and dvd comparison.

In 3/4 years time hd/blu ray (next gen) writers and players will be dirt cheap if they follow the same trend as CDWriters and DVD writers, which no doubt they will else no one would bother buying them.
We should be able to apply the same principal to SSD. The performance is better than what we have now. The capacity lacks but as I implied. Imagine we wrote hard drives off because they were only 40meg?

 

[cb62fcni]

No, no, the performance is NOT better than what we have now, that's what I'm getting at. Access times yes, they definately blow the pants off mechanical hdds, and always will. But data throughput and read/write performance are still way off from today's top-of-the-line mechanicals. It's not an insurmountable obstacle, and I'm sure they'll be able to address it, but as it stands right now, mechanical hard drives offer better performance. Seek times are important, yes, but it doesn't matter how fast you find the file if it takes you longer to chug it out into RAM. Especially with things like gaming and video encoding, where you're constantly pulling very large files off of the hdd, you would definately notice the difference 20Mbs makes.

 

[bberson]

Raptors are over priced trash anyway, lets hope this does get in and upgrade that bottleneck in all our pc's. The Hard Drive!

And now you can add me to the growing number of people here who can't understand why so much hatred is being directed at Western Digital's Raptor series. There have been no reports of reliability issues. The drives carry a five year warranty including the OEM models. They're designed to be the most reliable drive in the desktop market and without a doubt offer the fastest sustained transfer rates and seek times of any non- SCSI/SAS drive. They offer well engineered caching and seeking algorithms that allow them to actually outperform SCSI/SAS drives of twice the cost and they come out on top of nearly every benchmark to which they are subjected, for desktop -oriented usage patterns

Hey, I can't afford a Maybach but that doesn't mean it's trash.

For a bunch of people that are excited about paying over $1000 for a 128GB drive with inferior peak and average STR and only a seek advantage, I'm a little perplexed about what people think is overpriced trash.

-Brad

 

[PCD]

Since there are no moving parts, the drives can reach sustained read speeds of 62 MB/s and have an access time in the sub-millisecond range.

What are the write speeds? Read and Write speeds are very close on current HDDs but as far as I know the write speed for Solid State drives are about half the read speed, doesn't sound like much fun when the system is installing, saving or paging.

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

but who does any of that? nobody... thats the point!.

 

[cb62fcni]

Seriously, why the constant sarcasm? You and your friggin' wankel....

 

[CompTIA_Rep]

I usually start when the thread gets out of hand.
Dont mind me



Anyway, I think enough on both sides have been said on this theoretical topic.

 

[weskurtz81]

Well,

I just think you could have worded it a bit better. The name raptor might stay as Western Digital's enthusiast drive even if they change the technology of what is inside the raptor.

I am not raptor fanboy, however, I do see the strengths and weaknesses after using a couple for several years.

Of course the days are numbered for the current technology that lies within a Raptor, but, that goes the same for all of the current generation of hard drives. I don't understand why you didn't just put something like "All current Hard Drives days are numbered" of course refering to hard drives which store data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces.

So, my final point is, what did any of this have to do with the Raptor and not the rest of the hard drives? If something can over take the raptor then a price decrease and it will over take the rest.

wes

 

[flasher702]

Is it not possible to create an IDE/SATA interface into which you plug a large (4gb perhaps?) CF card, format it as NTFS and use it as a boot drive? I'm sure I've read about such a device somewhere...

get a couple of them... OS on one, swap on the other... Normal hard disk for apps/data. That'd kick ass!

Those solutions are available. but they aren't very fast. At and ISP I worked for they put them together with 64mb CF cards to make router systems but they were just cheap boot drives for linux, not used after the system was running.

As for the forthcoming flash drives: the sustained read/write speeds aren't very impressive. And they are expensive. However, they aren't too small. 128gb is plenty for OS, software and a small chunk of multi-media. For an ultra portable laptop or smaller device it's fine. For a desktip you could easily add a disk drive for more capacity.

Would make a nice swap drive or laptop drive, but I'm not sure if there is anything else it is good for with those low sustained transfer speeds. I think it would be too cost-prohibitive to really take advantage of the low latencies and high IOPS in a multi-user environment and I don't know how long they would last in such an application either.

 

[weskurtz81]

djgandy,

How good are the write speeds of flash? Last I read they were no where as good as the read speeds. I agree, once the write speeds and read speeds can atleast match todays HDD's, solid state will take over. But, I don't think it will be this year, maybe next year. They continue to shrink the flash memory, which will make it less expensive. Who cares about the Raptor in general, if flash can take over the Raptor, why stop there???? That is where the OP is flawed and so are you. Why talk about the Raptor, it is all of the current hard disk tech. that has been around for 20 years.

wes