Why do you have raptor HDs?

[jap0nes]

Next time folks be a little more mature and not garble up the topic with crap (staring at Japones)... I think Japones was the instigator here personally. And I think aragorn/Clue69less were right in what they said.

if you think Aragorn was right, you also should take his advice and let this go
i know i'm not doing this right now, but i could not let pass such hypocrisy

 

[jap0nes]

I still think harddrives are cheap enough and big enough to justify everyone doing raid 1 though. because they are known to be super unreliable.

i also think that drives are cheap and big enough that you can buy 3 of them for the price of 1 raptor, and you have speed and security, with at least 2 times the storage size

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

Hello,
It would seem that this thread has gone to a new level of silly.

The person asks, "Why do people get 2 Raptors bla bla?" There are some direct responses then the thread turns into a fight over TO RAID vs. NOT TO RAID or TO Raptor or NOT TO Raptor or....

Provided you have the equipment you can interleave data between 2 or more drives.

Raptors may or may not be worth the extra money yet that was not one of the thread starters questions.

As far as backing up data goes those that back up data that use a RAID or not loose less then those that don't back up their data. Just because you have an array there is no law that compels you to back stuff up. The odds of a drive failing go up as you add more drives as you would imagine.

Do arrays made of SATA or PATA drives offer help my system to go faster? To a point yes, however the fastest arrays are made of actual SCSI drives. SCSI drives can read and write on the fly while SATA or PATA drives must return to the ZERO track after reads or writes. The reason SATA/PATA RAID arrays have become popular is that they cost much less then SCSI and offer a gain in performance over single SATA/PATA drives.

If the question was, "Are Raptors worth the extra money?" The answers given are typically subjective. Here are some PRO/CON Raptor replies...
PRO:
1) My Raptors are faster then your 'blank'
2) My Raptors rotate @ 10000 RPMs so they are faster then your 'blank'
3) My cache is bigger then yours!
4) My Raptors are faster then your 'blanks'
5) My Raptors have a window so you can see the platters spin, etc.

CONS:
1) I have more space on my 'blanks' then you have on your Raptors for less $$$
2) My cache is the same size as yours for less money
3) I bought a better video card w/ the $$ I saved by not getting Raptors
4) I have a true SCSI array and there is nothing faster
5) I can buy 3 drives in place of every Raptor you can buy!

A_M's SIG of the moment!

 

[kitchenshark]

I would disagree with you in this regard. I've found that sustained transfer in Raptors has been noticably faster than a 7200RPM drive. REAL WORLD case in point:

The same time I got my 36Gb Raptor I got a 80Gb Maxtor 7200RPM hard drive. At the time I was using the 80Gb as my system drive and the Raptor for games and such, at one point I found it necessary to render a video stream and said rendering took 44minutes...yes, I was there, waiting for the entire time for it to complete.

One Windows crash later I decided to reload the OS onto the Raptor, and also discovered that the rendered video stream wasn't among my backed-up files. I rendered the stream again with all the working files on the Raptor...I started the batch and figured it'd take awhile, got up for a soda, and it COULDN'T have been more than 15 minutes and the stream was completely done when I got back.

I've used my Raptor for nearly 2 years now and have found its performance superior to any 7200RPM drive for my needs.

 

[Badong]

I have only one raptor 74g for over a year now and I can say I'm happy to have it. Booting windows is faster, loading games, installing programs. I think it's worth it. You should have atleast one raptor if you want a fast system, just my opinion.

 

[itneal2277]

I have been using 2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 for 3 years now with no problems. I chose RAID 0 because I do not want to sacrifice speed or capacity. As far as data backup, I use an external hard drive to store Norton Ghost images of my data. Doing this I enjoy the benefits of RAID 0 while my data remains protected. Having used other 7200RPM drives in the past I can vouch that Raptors offer significant performance gains. Now just because they cost 3 times more doesn't mean that they will perform 3 times better than other drives, but it is also important to note the reliability of these drives. These are file server grade drives we are talking about, that are meant for 24/7 operation and come with a five year warranty (at least mine did). In combination with the performance and reliability, I think the raptors are reasonably priced for an enthusiast who wants the best or someone who is looking to build a server. Also, to everyone who thinks the cost/capacity ratio sucks take a look on Newegg at some of the SCSI drives (remember Raptors are suppose to be comparable to SCSI). People who buy these drives are people who realize that the hard drive is one of the slowest (if not the slowest) device in a computer and want to remedy this bottleneck.

 

[michaelahess]

I just put a couple 15k scsi 36gb drives in one of my servers, there's a pricey drive

 

[itneal2277]

That's too pricey for me. That's why I like Raptors. They offer good performance at a reasonable price compared to lower end SCSI. Another thing to consider is that most motherboards don't come equipped with a SCSI controller so that is an addition cost that must be paid to add SCSI to a computer.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I have a 74GB Raptor because I wanted to use it as a fast drive for my OS and VMware machines to sit on. My setup is OS + VMware VMs on the Raptor and my documents on my 250GB Caviar SE16. I striped 6GB swap across both (that's a Linux trick.) An ideal setup for not that much money would be as follows:

2 WD Raptors in RAID 1 (via md/EVMS- "Linux software RAID.")
Larger, slower, cheaper HDD for files and not in the array.

The built-in software RAID function of md or EVMS is faster and performs better than hardware controllers that cost less than about 4 figures. md/EVMS does RAID levels linear, 0, 1, 4, and 5. If you want another RAID level, like 3, 6, or a nested level, then you need a hardware controller. RAID 1 does eat up a hard drive's capacity, but it is almost as fast as RAID 0 at reads as it does load balancing, but slower at writes. If you do a lot of writing, a single disk works best. RAID 0 is for people who want to lose their data, and RAID 4or 5 best utilizes 3 or more HDDs and a 3-disk RAID 4 or 5 won't match a 2-disk RAID 1 for read speed.

 

[MU_Engineer]

It all depends on the OS. I can install and configure a binary OS like SuSE 10 in about an hour- 15m for the install and then 45m to configure as /home is on a separate HDD so all files and such are not erased upon nuke-and-pave. Gentoo is another bird altogether and that took me about a day and a half to do as I had to compile and configure everything. Loading Windows on others' computers takes at best two hours (if there are a minimum of apps and files to reload, driver disks are handy, and if the Windows install disk is a recently slipstreamed one) up to the more common most of a day to fully reload all apps, retrieve all license keys, gather drivers and 500 MB of updates from the Internet, and restore 10-200 GB of files from another computer it was backed up to or a NAS box.

 

[MU_Engineer]

I've had 4 fail on me in the last 10 years- a 40MB SCSI Quantum Fireball in a Mac LCII, a 300MB SCSI Quantum in a PowerMac 225 MHz (forget the model number- 7200? 7600?) another Quantum Fireball, this time a 10GB IDE model in a K6-2/500 box, and finally a 60GB 4200rpm Toshiba notebook drive. I'd never do RAID 0 except for a scratch disk or something that is used for "volatile storage" even with the latest crop of Raptors being rated for 1.2M hours MTBF and a whole heck of a lot better than the cruddy Quantum models I have had die on me in the past.

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

I just put a couple 15k scsi 36gb drives in one of my servers, there's a pricey drive

By the way I'm not knocking Raptors at all it just happens that IDE drives are nothing like true SCSI. When you measure read speeds on IDEs there is no "track to track read speed" to check. Seagate 15k.3 SCSI drives (Cheetahs) have a .3 ms track to track time on 15000 RPM platters.

It is not even close so please don't insist that Raptors are like SCSI drives or even close to SCSI.

SATA & PATA drives offer low cost and for those that know how to build arrays using them are able to show transfer rates like 4GB over FC. I have set up a few editing systems like this and the clients had a lower cost of ownership. LIKE TATUNG makers of this 16 drive rack.

Media editing tends to want space, redundancy and then speed. RAW video footage can be 100s of GIGs.

Any way Raptors are one way to go. There are others.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Raptor's aren't SCSI-based drives with a SATA interface. They were simply meant to be a lower-cost alternative for companies who needed both space and speed. They're still not reliable but they're getting close especially with the 150 gig drives. Personally I prefer SCSIs. I don't have any on my personal comp but I have a few at my school and they get Windows NT up really fast.

On the topic of RAID, I'm not a big fan of RAID 1 or 0 because with 0 you lose all your data (which yes, I have done with WD's, I know amazing isn't it?) if just one of the drives goes down. With RAID 1 a virus will affect both drives, so it's a double-edged sword when it comes to security. Personally I'm more of a fan of RAID 5 or 6. I've used both and they give great performance and reliabilty. Just to put my 2 cents out there...

 

[michaelahess]

Take apart a raptor and a current scsi drive, they share more in common than any ide/sata drive. They were adapted from WD's enterprise scsi drives. Hence the 24/7 operation rating, the high mtbf, the higher noise output, the higher temps, the faster speed, oh yeah and the price, you think they could make a regular 7200rpm drive go 10k? Think again, the platters would flex right off the bearings! WD could make raptors do 15k if it weren't for the fact that they are selling to average consumers. Anyone who uses enterprise class scsi/fc drives KNOWS how to handle them. You and your brother (not you literally) most likely do not.

I'm sick of people saying "name the type of drive" isn't reliable, other than deathstars and most late model maxtors, a well maintained drive will last 10 years with no problem (I've had literally hundreds of drives last that long). I've had every brand, even old maxtors last that long, and current drives are being built better, higher quality bearings, shafts, heads, etc.

I prefer scsi if there's the budget for it, they are faster than any other drive when put in arrays (other than fc but that gets even pricier and are very rarely necessary). Raptors are almost as good, and a couple of 7200 sata's are pretty close for most common computing tasks.

 

[syn1kk]

arg all the posts are too verbose... =P

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

Take apart a raptor and a current scsi drive, they share more in common than any ide/sata drive. They were adapted from WD's enterprise scsi drives. Hence the 24/7 operation rating, the high mtbf, the higher noise output, the higher temps, the faster speed, oh yeah and the price, you think they could make a regular 7200rpm drive go 10k? Think again, the platters would flex right off the bearings! WD could make raptors do 15k if it weren't for the fact that they are selling to average consumers. Anyone who uses enterprise class scsi/fc drives KNOWS how to handle them. You and your brother (not you literally) most likely do not.

I'm sick of people saying "name the type of drive" isn't reliable, other than deathstars and most late model maxtors, a well maintained drive will last 10 years with no problem (I've had literally hundreds of drives last that long). I've had every brand, even old maxtors last that long, and current drives are being built better, higher quality bearings, shafts, heads, etc.

I prefer scsi if there's the budget for it, they are faster than any other drive when put in arrays (other than fc but that gets even pricier and are very rarely necessary). Raptors are almost as good, and a couple of 7200 sata's are pretty close for most common computing tasks.

So in reading this quoted post above your contention is that the WD engineers adapted Raptors from SCSI drives? So now let us get to the truth.
Once upon a time in the long ago there was NO Western Digital Corp. since IBM made the original hard drive. As pictured here (the disks are the big things behind the glass behind the lady)

The first drives made by IBM were SCSI. So when you talk about PATA or SATA you have to thank IBM since they invented SCSI and IDE. The RAPTOR is an IDE drive or also known as ATAPI. Regardless of what you believe there are so many differences I don't know where to begin.

I'm sure I don't need to rehash the basic differences between SCSI and IDE/ATA like SCSI cards, chains, terminators, etc. I'm sure we all know the basic similarities too like platters, motors, actuators, etc. Let us just discuss a few points about drives to deepen the understanding of different types of drives.

ZERO TRACK is not the resting place of the read/write heads as that place has it's own name called of all things "The Landing Zone". Modern drives allow the actuator to be yanked back thus allowing the heads to be parked in the landing zone in thge event of power loss, etc. This protects the platters from a true crash. Once a drive has spun up to operating speed the actuator moves the the heads to the zero track.

After zero track the difference of operation becomes amazingly glaring. In an ATA drive the heads must return to zero track after every read or write. SCSI drives are that much faster since their heads can read or write on the fly. The time it takes for the head to get from track to track is measured in micro seconds and it is often called track to track time. Since IDE/ATAPI drives must go back to zero between actions there is no track to track time for them.

Raptors have a lower seek time then other IDE drives since the platters spin at 10,000 RPMs. Regardless of the spindle speed Raptors can not be chained in the same way that SCSI drives can and they can not read and write on the fly. Currently SCUSI drives have reached 15,000 RPMs and maybe one day Seagate will make their own version of a Raptor using their 15,000 RPM motor and platters?

 

[clue69less]

maybe one day Seagate will make their own version of a Raptor using their 15,000 RPM motor and platters?

As long as you're imagineering, please request it be perpendicular, large cache and most importantly, CHEAP!

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

maybe one day Seagate will make their own version of a Raptor using their 15,000 RPM motor and platters?

As long as you're imagineering, please request it be perpendicular, large cache and most importantly, CHEAP!

LMAO "IMAGINEERING" I love this word and I want to be one now. Hi I would like to enroll in your IMAGINEERING class! That has to be the non-word that should be a word of the year word...well done Clue69Less

 

[clue69less]

LMAO "IMAGINEERING" I love this word and I want to be one now. Hi I would like to enroll in your IMAGINEERING class! That has to be the non-word that should be a word of the year word...well done Clue69Less

Yea, I'm piled high and deep in imagineering.

 

[michaelahess]

The drive plattens, actuators, spindles, etc, are the same whether scsi or sata or ide, scsi or more accurately enterprise class drives, are built more robust, whether scsi or fc. The difference is in the controller system, look at sas drives, they use the SCSI protocal over a sata connector, you're getting your concepts mixed up. If someone where willing to put an ide interface on a drive (ide uses the atapi protocal) but require it use scsi as the protocal you could do the same thing with them, except that the ide controllers won't support the scsi protocal. The drives are the same until you slap a circuit board on them and then the only difference is in how they signal. Saying scsi has termination and what not isn't even relavent to the manufacturing or quality of the drive itself. If a sata controller board knew about the technical differences in a 10k vs 15k drive it could handle it just as well, and guess what, they do, it's called Serial Attached SCSI.

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

The drive plattens, actuators, spindles, etc, are the same whether scsi or sata or ide, scsi or more accurately enterprise class drives, are built more robust, whether scsi or fc.

So according to you they are the same but different. Think about that for a while and you will see that that can't be true. Clearly they are different since at least they are built more robust.

The difference is in the controller system, look at sas drives, they use the SCSI protocal over a sata connector, you're getting your concepts mixed up. If someone where willing to put an ide interface on a drive (ide uses the atapi protocal) but require it use scsi as the protocal you could do the same thing with them, except that the ide controllers won't support the scsi protocal. The drives are the same until you slap a circuit board on them and then the only difference is in how they signal.

I didn't choose to discuss the differences in hardware since you could look all that up online. IBM invented pretty much everything. IBM invented SCSI and that is an acronym for Small Computer System Interface. SCSI devices do not have onboard controllers Drives that contain the drive control circuitry are known as having Integrated Drive Electronics or IDE drives. I talked about the clear difference that makes SCSI drives the king of speed. They can read and write on the FLY while Raptors must go to the ZERO track after every read and write.

Saying scsi has termination and what not isn't even relavent to the manufacturing or quality of the drive itself. If a sata controller board knew about the technical differences in a 10k vs 15k drive it could handle it just as well, and guess what, they do, it's called Serial Attached SCSI.

Here you go on about quality and then twist a few of my comments. First SCSI chains need termination this happens onboard these days however in the old days there was a terminator cap that was used. I did not talk about termination at all I just mentioned it as one of the terms or jargons used to talk about things that are SCSI. IDE, ATAPI, PATA and SATA have nothing in common with actual SCSI drives except for some components that have the same name like platters, heads, etc. The controller for a SCSI drive is part of the SCSI card.

If you have Raptors rest assured their speed comes from faster spindle rotation. Raptors are MUCH slower then actual modern SCSI drives. Again SCSI can read and write on the FLY and that speeds things up add that to the fact that 15,000 RPMs is 5,000 RPMs faster then the Raptor. At one point I brought up SCSI arrays built with SATA drives. These arrays connect to the PC or MAC using SCSI or FC (fiber channel). It is valuable to mention these arrays since they offer decent speed at low cost since the IDE drives (SATA & PATA) they use cost less then SCSI drives. For the time being SCSI is still KING!

So Michaelahess what was your post about?

 

[michaelahess]

Ok, simple terms here, Raptors are built as well as scsi drives. They are a higher quality drive than other consumer grade products, that's all I'm saying. RAID0 with raptors is just as good (quality wise) as a scsi array.

It's like talking about cars, they all have the same components, some are just built better, doesn't matter if you have a v6 or a v8, a chevy or a lexus. Consumer grade drives are like chevy's (ok, not that bad) and enterprise grade drives are like lexus', the Raptor is a lexus, just doesn't hit 180, only 160.

So according to you they are the same but different. Think about that for a while and you will see that that can't be true. Clearly they are different since at least they are built more robust.

They are the same, the technologies and mechanics are essentialy identical, just of different qualities. So yeah, after thinking about it, they are the same.

You keep trying to say scsi is a different type of drive, it's not, the interface and controller is the ONLY thing different and all it affects is random I/O performance. I've seen arrays of sata drives with the same average throughput as a scsi array, but I wouldn't use them for sql servers because the I/O is too low, they would be equal for everyday computing though. Thus scsi isn't "better" it simply has a talent for I/O ops/sec. Of course Raptors DO have a higher I/O than other IDE/SATA drives, may not be as fast as true scsi drives but they are optimized for consumer use, not server use. And it's only the controller that makes the difference.

IDE, ATAPI, PATA and SATA have nothing in common with actual SCSI drives except for some components that have the same name like platters, heads, etc. The controller for a SCSI drive is part of the SCSI card.

You just practiced what you preached, they are different but the same.

I've been using scsi since the early 90's, I've ripped into plenty of drives, I have 2 2ft diameter platters that I made into end tables (out of an IBM mainframe, it wasn't scsi). The inards are the same. The drives are the same. The quality and interface differ, but Raptors are the same quality as scsi drives. You said Raptors are lower quality, they aren't.

By the way, ATA (the real term for IDE's interface) was created by Imprimis, Western Digital, and Compaq. IBM did NOT invent ATA/IDE. Original ATA drives were made popular by Conner (how many remember them?) PATA and SATA are simply Parallel and Serial versions of the same basic interface.

The SCSI standard was adopted in 1986 having been the sucessor of SASI, an interface designed in 1979 by the founder of Seagate, again NOT IBM, NCR and Alan Shugart (SASI) got the X3T9.2 committee formed to standardize SCSI. And obviously SCSI isn't only for HD's like ATA is. This info was found at:

SCSI History

ATAPI (AT Atachment Packet Interface) is for optical and tape devices, it's an interface allowing SCSI commands to travel over the ATA bus as ATA commands can't control certain functions of optical/tape drives.

Hosts control ATAPI devices using SCSI command packets. The SCSI command packets are transported over the ATA interface, instead of the parallel SCSI bus. This cool hack is described in ATA/ATAPI-6.

From:

ATAPI Documentation

Shall we bring up RLL and MFM while we're at it?

Raptors are the same quality as enterprise class drives, simple as that.

 

[jap0nes]

I think i understand what you said, and i agree. The principle behind scsi and sata drives are the same: a spinning disk with a moving head. The main and only difference is in the controller board. they are so similar that there are SAS drives, like you pointed out too.

Like you said too, scsi's main advantage is on i/o and like i was saying before, the main difference between a raptor and an average 7,200 rpm is....... i/o. I/O makes a big difference in database servers, web servers, file servers. It makes a big difference for...... server. There is and advantage in home use over 7200 rpm drives, but not like on a server environment.

 

[michaelahess]

Exactly my point! Thanks!

 

[Alpha_Magnum]

Here is what you said...

The drive plattens, actuators, spindles, etc, are the same whether scsi or sata or ide, scsi or more accurately enterprise class drives, are built more robust, whether scsi or fc.

Then you said

They are the same, the technologies and mechanics are essentialy identical, just of different qualities. So yeah, after thinking about it, they are the same.

So then why are there still SCSI drives and SATA drives if they are the same? Hark I know why it is due to the fact that SCSI drives read and write on the fly while rest can't!

You keep trying to say scsi is a different type of drive, it's not, the interface and controller is the ONLY thing different and all it affects is random I/O performance.

You have that in reverse. You keep trying to say that SATA drives are the same as SCSI. You seem to have things all mixed up. Your attempting to make Raptors into something they are not. They are not SCSI drives in any way at all.
You mentioned SAS drives. These are real SCSI drives that have a newer interface so that way drives no longer need to be daisy chained! Raptors are nothing like SAS drives. Raptors are nothing like FC drives. Raptors are like fast turning IBM GXP75s.

You said...

By the way, ATA (the real term for IDE's interface) was created by Imprimis, Western Digital, and Compaq. IBM did NOT invent ATA/IDE. Original ATA drives were made popular by Conner (how many remember them?) PATA and SATA are simply Parallel and Serial versions of the same basic interface.

IBM did in fact invent IDE and they invented SCSI. IBM employed a man named Larry Boucher and they devloped SCSI. Later on Boucher left IBM for Shugart Associates he took SCSI with him. In 1981 Boucher founded Adaptec Corp. makers of SCSI cards that we all know and love.
You brought up RLL (IBM invention) MFM (Magnetic Force Microscopy I guess) and I just don't care.
Raptors are the top end of IDE drives and they are NOT SCSI drives![/quote]