WD1500AD Raptor X-Tends Performance Lead

[pschmid]

In its new 10,000 RPM Raptor drive, Western Digital improved the technology, doubled the capacity to 150 GB, and added a clear cover option. It hammers single drive competitors, of course, but can it stand up to a RAID 0 setup consisting of two 7,200 RPM drives?

 

[mpjesse]

RAID 0 generally is the best choice if you require high data transfer rates; in fact, it is possible to almost double throughput numbers by deploying a RAID 0 configuration. However, access times do not improve, and sometimes you will even see an increase in access time. Your everyday life with Windows won't be accelerated much by using a RAID 0 array, even if many people tend to believe that! We have proof for this statement in the form of benchmark numbers that compare the WD1500 Raptor with a two-drive RAID 0 setup that consists of two 7,200 RPM drives.

Proof? Their RAID 0 benchmarks were half baked! Comparing 2 Seagate 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 to 1 WD 10,000 RPM drive is like trying to compare a 4.3L V6 to a 4.6L V8. I am very disappointed with this article. If they had left the RAID 0 benches out it would have been fine, but they did a horrible job trying to compare RAID 0. They never even benched the WD1500AD in RAID 0!

I don't care what the frigin benchmarks say, RAID 0 makes a big difference in real world performance. Especially when you're running a write intensive application (like bit torrent or WinRAR) and trying to watch a movie, music, or surf the net at the same time. Any time you're both reading and writing in RAID 0- you're going to see a difference.

No offense to the authors, but this article is a frigin mess. You only benched the Seagate RAID 0 setup in ONE real world benchmark: WinXP start up which is pure READ. For some reason you left out the WRITE performance of the PCMark05 test. Why is that?

-mpjesse

 

[pschmid]

I guess it should be obvious that a WD1500 RAID0 would blow away any compatition anyway. We actually had lots of readers asking for compare the new drive vs. a 7,200 rpm RAID0 since you can get two 250 GB drives for the same money.

What internet access do you use to actually max out your HDs' write performance with p2p clients?

The File Write benchmark returned messy numbers, so we dropped it. It was something in the area of 30 MB/s, which obviously isn't the case.

 

[kolemunky]

heres a question.....what would be a better way to go...A single raptor 150 or dual raptor 74s in RAID0. It would be the same price but what about performance.

 

[pschmid]

Two WD740 in RAID 0 beat one WD1500 easily.

 

[MadModMike]

heres a question.....what would be a better way to go...A single raptor 150 or dual raptor 74s in RAID0. It would be the same price but what about performance.

Definately the 2 74GB. From looking at that article, it appears a single 150GB Raptor-X gets a max of 88MB/s (or was it 80?, too lazy to recheck) whereas 2 74GB Raptors can yield up to 137MB/s, as is the case with mine. A sngle 74GB Raptor, at least all 6 I have, get avg of 70MB/s sustained Read/Write, that's barely less than a 150GB taking into account it's sustained and it's price (too high for it's low performance, IMHO). I would strongly recommend getting RAID 0 of 2 74GB, or if you want extreme performance, get 4, my 4-RAID0 array gets 201MB/s Sustained Read/Wite with 440MB/s Burst Read, worth every penny.

~~Mad Mod Mike, pimpin' the world 1 rig at a time

 

[nobly]

RAID 0 generally is the best choice if you require high data transfer rates; in fact, it is possible to almost double throughput numbers by deploying a RAID 0 configuration. However, access times do not improve, and sometimes you will even see an increase in access time. Your everyday life with Windows won't be accelerated much by using a RAID 0 array, even if many people tend to believe that! We have proof for this statement in the form of benchmark numbers that compare the WD1500 Raptor with a two-drive RAID 0 setup that consists of two 7,200 RPM drives.

Proof? Their RAID 0 benchmarks were half baked! Comparing 2 Seagate 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 to 1 WD 10,000 RPM drive is like trying to compare a 4.3L V6 to a 4.6L V8. I am very disappointed with this article. If they had left the RAID 0 benches out it would have been fine, but they did a horrible job trying to compare RAID 0. They never even benched the WD1500AD in RAID 0!

I don't care what the frigin benchmarks say, RAID 0 makes a big difference in real world performance. Especially when you're running a write intensive application (like bit torrent or WinRAR) and trying to watch a movie, music, or surf the net at the same time. Any time you're both reading and writing in RAID 0- you're going to see a difference.

No offense to the authors, but this article is a frigin mess. You only benched the Seagate RAID 0 setup in ONE real world benchmark: WinXP start up which is pure READ. For some reason you left out the WRITE performance of the PCMark05 test. Why is that?

-mpjesse

I totally agree! This article was not very well thought out. Its as if they just threw in the RAID at the last 2 minutes and scrounged around for 2 HDDs. And the fact that they only used 2 seagate's is very pointed. They should write another article with the 150GB Raptor vs all kinds of brands in RAID 0 if they wanted to boast about it. Maybe they should use different controllers while they're at it...

This article tells me that they are just getting plain lazy.

 

[pschmid]

What sense would it make to compare Raptor vs. all other brands' 7,200 drives in RAID0? I doubt anyone really believes the outcome would be significantly different.

 

[MadModMike]

What sense would it make to compare Raptor vs. all other brands' 7,200 drives in RAID0? I doubt anyone really believes the outcome would be significantly different.

Are you saying that 1 Raptor 150GB can't be beat by a RAID 0 of 2 7200RPM HDD's? If you're saying that, you're dead wrong. My RAID 0 of 2 200GB SATA 7200RPM Maxtor 8MB Cache get 101MB/s Sustained, that's more than the 150GB Raptor. The 1 thing I found interesting was my 4 Raptor 74GB vs. my 4 200GB 7200RPM SATA RAID 0. The 4 Raptors get sustained 201MB/s, while the 4 200GB 7200RPM's get 203MB/s sustained (Read & Write), the Raptors do get way more burst, but their sustained's are identical almost.

~~Mad Mod Mike, pimpin' the world 1 rig at a time

 

[sleepdeprived82]

Can we have a clip of it in action, I want to see it at work

Sad I know, but I have little else to watch hollywood is rubbish these days

 

[kittle]

can you please redo your benchmark graphics to highlight the 2 drives your comparing here? only a few of the graphs have them highlighted.

And to that end.. is it me? or did the RAID0 write numbers get left out? ... I cant seem to find them.

Something else to add in would be the price per gigabyte (including a RAID0 controller).
And also a comparable scsi performance - also with price per GB, temprature and noise. Are these drives _really_ as expensive, loud and hot as people beleive?

 

[mpjesse]

Thanks for the response.

What internet access do you use to actually max out your HDs' write performance with p2p clients?

I've got the 8mbit package from comcast. The only thing that's managed to max out my connection is bittorrent, which I happen to use constantly. If I'm not downloading a torrent I'm uploading one. Anyways, as you probably know, bit torrent is read/write intensive- more so than any P2P program. Thought 8mibts doesn't even come close to maxing out read/write performance, it is taxing because it's a constant read/write stream. On high bandwidth downloads (800KB/s+) I've sat there and listened to my drive heavily using it's cache and writing stuff in bursts to the hard drives.

I can say that RAID 0 has helped me significantly when I'm trying to do other things like UnRAR, watch a divx/xvid movie, listen to lossless mp3's etc. Since i'm always using Bit Torrent, this is always the case for me.

-mpjesse

 

[mpjesse]

I think the major point of contention for me is that you didn't compare the WD1500AD in RAID 0 vs. Non-RAID. Maybe this was because you only had 1 WD1500AD? If so, I can understand why...

Still it would have been interesting to see the performance difference.

IMO, 2x 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 to a WD1500AD is hardly fair.

-mpjesse

 

[mpjesse]

Oh... the other thing that bothered me was this statement:

Your everyday life with Windows won't be accelerated much by using a RAID 0 array, even if many people tend to believe that! We have proof for this statement in the form of benchmark numbers that compare the WD1500 Raptor with a two-drive RAID 0 setup that consists of two 7,200 RPM drives.

The only "every day life" benchmark you ran with respect to RAID 0 was the PcMark05 WinXP Startup.

1 benchmark should not be the deciding factor on a statement like that.

-mpjesse

 

[RichPLS]

So, my two RAID 0 74gig Rapters smokes the new Raptor 150 and the two RAID 0 7200rpm seagates or any other pair of 7200rpm drives!!!

 

[PlutoDelic]

i personaly have a WDRaptor 74 GB and a WD Caviar SE16 400 GB

my windows 2000 boots 2x faster then any XP on a 7200 RPM drive...

my opinion, raptors have EFFECT if u feed them alone in the ROOM, and how "mpjesse" sad, comparing them with RAID 0, thats was not really good

ps, the WD1500AD is a killer hardware, a musthave for every PERFORMANCE freak, all i can say is lets wait for a SATA 300 version, i bet they will make one!

 

[davemar14]

Oh, well my 2x74GB Raptors still smoke the 150GB Raptor. For all of you questioning the speed of RAID, here is a benchmark of my Raptors in RAID 0.
Raptors really shine when I am moving huge files, or doing video editing.


Raptor Benchmark:
http://amdgamingrig.dyndns.org/raptors.html

My System:
http://amdgamingrig.dyndns.org

 

[Meestor_X]

I'm amazed that none of you saw the review of this drive a month ago at Storagereview. http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html It's an excellent article.

Regarding 2x74g Raptors in Raid0 vs. 1x150g Raptor, they had this to say: http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?s=&showtopic=21621&view=findpost&p=221874

Which shows that only 4x74g Raptors in Raid0 can compete with the new Raptor.

Their findings, not mine!

 

[mpjesse]

Heeeeeellll no. LOL. I'm using the NVRAID controller. Anyone using RAID 0 w/ 74GB raptors on a PCI SI controller is wasting their time.

No offense RichPLS... I know you liketh those SI controllers.

-mpjesse

 

[Meestor_X]

My apologies, then.
I just wanted the people that were looking at the 2xRaid0 74g Raptors vs. the new 150g Raptor to make sure they've read that before they make their decisions.

 

[CtrlAltDel]

Dear gurus,

I'm planning to set tup some sort of Raptor based solution, and tried to learn what is the optimal solution. One 150g Raptor would be easy and would probably boost the performance nicely. Anyone care to speculate e.g. the usage of pagefile with Raptors? Just stick to one 150g, would 2x74g with pagefile on the other drive be any good? Raid 0 is not probably for me, partly due to the risk, partly because some benchmarks show that it would not be such a performance increase.

I will start with my old machine p4 2.8@3.45, asus p4p800 and 1gig memory, just gaming and stuff. Will be something else soon... The whole thing here is more about getting experience and having fun, rather than optimizing the system for some specific tasks (like video editing which I don't do).

Any comments/advices appreciated!

 

[DASTRAL]

I can say that RAID 0 has helped me significantly when I'm trying to do other things like UnRAR, watch a divx/xvid movie, listen to lossless mp3's etc. Since i'm always using Bit Torrent, this is always the case for me

I do understand the need for a RAID when using intensive apps.
Audio / Video / CAD etc etc.

But for P2P it would seem a lot "rational" to opt for a 300GB HDD.
And just dedicate it (physically) to P2P.

Thats what i did (no net for 2 3 more months) and i will go back to that.
Its simpler & safer. At 400 500k/s it was fine.

For viewing / unrar / toying with any files, i copied them to another disk.
(I do admit a bit slowly) then fooled around on the non P2P disk.

 

[raypitt]

What I would really like to see is 2 Raptor 150GB on a 3Ware 9550 controller running Linux and formated with XFS running something like MySQL with several queries to see if the NCQ makes a difference. That would be a benchmark, not how fast Windows loads?

 

[G0su]

Hi, are the older Raptors that are tested here the WD740GD (74 gig) and the WD360GD (36.7 gig)? In this chart, the 36 gig version is called WD360, and without TCQ. Is that lack of TCQ at the 36 gig version the reason why it performs so bad in comparison to his 74gig brother??

Thanks in advance!

-g0su

 

[mpjesse]

I don't <think> so. I've seen several benchmarks that have shown TCQ and NCQ actually slow down the Raptors. Not sure why that is... but i've seen it.

-mpjesse