WD1500AD Raptor X-Tends Performance Lead

[G0su]

Then can you give me any reason why the 36 gig performedso bad in this test? I was about to but it as bootdisk, but seen these results that won't be of any use.. :/ I am asuming now there are 2 old Raptors: 74gig and 36gig version without any differences other than the size, can anyone confirm that? I am confused :S

Thanks,

-g0su

 

[bourgeoisdude]

3 old raptors: 36GB version, 74GB version (same architecture and specs as 36GB), and revised 74GB (adds TCQ and some other stuff...I forget ) See this (read the 4th 5th and 6th paragraphs)

 

[bourgeoisdude]

The WD360GD was just a one off beta testing thing which didn't last long. It had smaller density platter(=lower data rate) and it's servo mechanism was on older generation 10k SCSI compared to the ones used in WD740GD.

Newer WD740GD has the exact physical as the first WD740GD, but the firmware constantly evolve.

Yes and no. Read my last post...the newer WD740GD is not just a firmware update...

 

[ric449]

Actually, I bet the benchmarks comparing RAID-0 to the Raptor are spot on. Check other sites, storage review, overclockers.com, and pretty much any other. Most of them come to the same conclusion: unless you are doing some pretty intense work (we're talking servers here, not games), RAID-0 will NOT help. Sure, the throughput is there, but that isn't everything.

And as for people saying how their setup blows away the other because they have RAID etc, I'm not buying it. It seems peoples views on hardware get changed a lot if they actually own it, very few people would say "I bought a RAID-0 setup and it is just the same as having a Raptor". It's sort of like a placebo, you have something that is supposed to be better than the rest, and even if it isn't, chances are you would still think the system is faster than the rest even if I broke in one night and took away one of the hard drives.

 

[shellghost]

/qoute article:
It is no coincidence that the technical data of the WD1500AD Raptor and the Raptor-X resemble each other. As a matter of fact, the top cover part is the only real difference between both models, giving WD quite a bit of flexibility in producing either to meet demand. Such a strategy is widely used in aircraft construction as well, where it is necessary to switch quickly and easily from windowless cargo models to window-equipped passenger jets.
/qoute article

There is one more difference between the one with a see-thru cover and the one that does not have that...
THe MTBF is cut in half.
The "normal" one has a MTBF of 1,5 million hours, the X versie "only" 600.000 hours.

 

[GraveLayer]

So the Nforce4 Ultra boards with 4 SATA plugs are 2 or 4 channel? I have a K8N Ultra with a couple 74G Raptors in RAID0. Love them but I was never able to figure out if 4 would be that much better than 2 on the NVRAID controller.

Anyone?

 

[mpjesse]

Farking excellent observation. Did anyone know this? I sure as hell didn't. I won't be getting the X version. Thanks for pointing that out.

-mpjesse

 

[529th]

as far as my needs are concerned the WD1500ADFD will suit me fine for my main drive.

thinking about the X version being catored to the Gamer market which the article says it was "built" on, i'd have to say its a slap in the face to gamers for adding that stupid window that probably won't be seen and charging 50 more $ for it with no additional performance...

gg

data

 

[ratherrapid]

nice wd raptor 150 comparitive Raid 0 review at hothardware.com. aids ending the Raid 0 debate.

 

[GraveLayer]

nice wd raptor 150 comparitive Raid 0 review at hothardware.com. aids ending the Raid 0 debate.

Level load time is what is important to me as my box is used for gaming. I know that BF2 loads much faster with RAID0 then with a single Raptor. That review shows that

 

[ratherrapid]

i only know what i read, but, that hothardware.com review of raptors in raid 0 comparing with single 74 gb and 150 gb raptors and the maxtor single and in raid seemed an eye opener. i have a couple of the 150 gb raptors sitting on my floor ready for installation in Raid 0. we use them in office apps for extended merges and mailing, collating or merging multiple files--that sort of thing seems hardrive stuff, and so im anxious to see what the raptors combined with amd64x4800 an corsair 3500 can do. i too was a little bit disappointed in the seeming laziness of the tom's hardware review of the raptors. maybe sometime they can provide a complete review as they have done so superbly in the past.

 

[picture_perfect]

for me the raid 0 vs. single raptor specs were great since those were the two options im lookin at right now building a rig - good read constructive criticism would be:

1) decibel figures (had to get them from reading this thread)
2) more real-world stats(like loading maps)
3) the aforementioned missing raid 0 stats

 

[IntelligentDonkey]

It seems to me that several people see the MTBF of the regular version as 1.2 million hours and the X as 600,000 hours as meaning that the ‘X’ is half as reliable as the regular version. While this may be true, I don’t know if it is something that one should be concerned about. If I understand the Mean Time Between Failure correctly it is saying that under normal operating conditions, after 600,000 hours of service about half of the 'X' series of drives will have failed. Therefore the 'average' Raptor X drive will last about 600,000 hours. So, if a perfectly average drive were installed on January 1st, 2006 at midnight one would expect it to fail around Midnight June 13, 2074 (if I did my math correctly). A regular raptor could be expected to last almost into 2143. Either of these drives has a very good chance of functioning beyond my own lifetime, and by these hours it is almost guaranteed that they will be obsolete long before they fail. So I don’t understand why people are making a big deal about this. If I am misinterpretating the numbers please let me know.

 

[IVAces]

They're cool and all but I dont have a drive cage that exposes my drives.

BTW, Here is an article matching up wd's RE2's, Segates 7200 500gb model and RaptorX 150's in both single drive and raid configs.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1926848,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

You'll be surprised to know that the WD RE2's are similar in performance to the raptors in a raided config because they're designed to run in raid.

 

[FlyGuy]

Nice, short little article but I hate just seeing synthetic benchmarks. :roll:

 

[BKD]

An acrylic top that sits where nobody will ever see it. That makes no sense, or does it? The acrylic top is art, and like all art it speaks of a mystery which, like the acrylic top, makes no logical sense. The shortest distance between two lines is a straight line, right? Our computers operate in bolian logic, yes now or yes later, sort of like Bush taking us to war with Iraq. That’s the staightline, or flat line, method. Reality teaches us that the flat line method msteriously is a huge mistake. Art speaks to us and reminds us of that mystery. It’s a lesson that the human race and the computer industry is sorely in need in of remembering today. It’s apparently something that WD is remembering with this acrylic top. When we remember ourselves and our place, we also remember all those before us. It is this remembering that opens the door to a brighter future, not flat line, Hitler in a tank, guns blazing, no questions asked and no prisoner’s taken. It’s the mystery that attracks us to the story of the cross, that somehow accepting the possibility of defeat, stoping to smell the flowers, that somehow that matters, not just to us, but to some mysterious element of life that speaks to us as human beings even as a work of art, even one tucked away inside our computers, speaks to us and leads us to remember.

 

[FlyGuy]

fuck dude, pass that doobie my way!

 

[MU_Engineer]

Well, how about running two HDDs in a JBOD setup with the OS on one drive and your documents on another? That way, the BitTorrent R/W from the doc drive and the OS reads from the other and you don't have the CPU overhead using lvm or software RAID, driver flakiness from using hardware RAID, or risk one drive dying taking out everything.

But if you only have one thing that you need to access, maybe RAID 1+0 would be better as you have redundancy. I dunno, but I get the willies when I see striping without parity.

 

[MU_Engineer]

That 440MB/sec burst read is over 3.5Gbps- you better have that RAID on a good controller!

 

[leexgx]

this is the problem i have been haveing my 2x80gb (or even 4x when testing) did not brake the 110-120MB/s limit

there seems to be an limit on the onboard controller of i guess of 133 (sounds like UDMA133 limit to me, cheap upgrade to the chip set useing an UDMA to SATA converter built into the chip?? but making the max speed of Sata stuck at 133)

can you please retest useing an PCI-E raid card (4x) each hdd should be able to do about 60-70MB/s when running tests on my nvidia set up (and the crapy silcion image thing) i get just about the same results ? (randome speeds go up an little)

(any one seen an cheap PCI-e card i can buy )

 

[MU_Engineer]

Well, the throughput of the array can depend on several factors, one of which is the controller-to-computer bus bandwidth. Another is the throughput of the drives themselves, the file systems used on the drives, the type of array used (also stripe width, etc) and lastly the kind of testing you do.

If you have a PCI SATA controller card, you'll never see more than 133MB/sec as that is all that a standard 33MHz 32-bit PCI bus can handle. 64-bit PCI-X busses run at 66MHz and can carry up to 533MB/s of data, but those are only on server boards. There are also 100MHz (800 MB/s) and 133 MHz (1066 MB/s) PCI-X slots. PCI Express is commonly seen on consumer boards and each lane can carry 2.5Gbps (250MB/sec) in each direction. So an x1 PCI-e card should be able to support more than 120MB/sec. On-board SATA controllers generally have a direct link to the southbridge or are multi-lane PCI-express so they are fast too.

Disks have a little bit of overhead when running in an array. If your 60-70MB/sec individual disks run in tandem, getting ~120MB/sec is normal. It's the same case as to where a dual-core CPU is not quite exactly twice as fast as a single core as there is a little bit of data-shuffling overhead to overcome.

 

[n0b1t]

I dont get it. Not many people seem to care about the price of this baby. 2 in Raid0 would be unrivalled they say. Seriously doubt it.

Where Im from, they cost 360eu (400 with the glass). Which translates to 720eu to get an "unrivalled" setup.

While on the other hand, I bought 4 seagates 7200 @ 54 each, which calculates to 220eu. Thats less than a THIRD of the price. From what i ve seen on the net in terms of speed, my setup is significantly quicker than the raptorx raid. And even if its not, it is damn quick. I can post bench results if you want.

On the downside, I draw more power and utilise all SATA ports. Well, I can live with that, because I ve got same speeds, same capacity, and money left to buy a dual core cpu.

Raptors are great drives and quite fancy with the glass. But they are terribly expensive. At their cost, they re nowhere near performance lead.

 

[polishruben]

I have been using raid0 for about 2 years with 7200 rpm ibm deskstar disc, and I am now just building a new pc. I won't bore you with the specs, but I want to look into raptors drives. And here is the question - where would be most beneficial to put the drives ?

A) as a system disc drive ( whole drive for c:windows and all what he need s ( page file system etc )

B) as a program files drive ( drogram files )

c) as a multimedia storage disc- where I keep all my Photoshop files, video files etc.

All the drives are ( will be ) separated, no partitions! I want to keep system drive separate from program files and separate from my multimedia files. It seems to work the best for me so far..

So what you guys think ? Most likely I would go with 2 x74 Rappies in SATA raid0 than just one rapX - as suggested above.

Oh, with option A – if someone would be concerned to put raid 0 as a system drive: no worries. I ran backup every 15 hours.

Thanks for help 8O