about bloody time as well, the old ones were getting quite decrepid tbh http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html fapping quick in a single-user environment as well! Unless the next generation of 15k drives betters it, I may have to bid my scsi setup farewell
/beats Hamish with the same 2 raptors the thing about the capacity, id much perfer a smaller one, there *may* be a 74GB single-platter drive coming out, in the same series as this one (i say "may" very very loosely) but tbh id prefer a 36GB one (even an 18GB one would suit me, but thats physically impossible) All I'd want on a drive like this is the OS and applications, which is around 5-6GB for me. I dont need to have 1000+ IO/sec for mp3s, videos and other storage type files, even with games, loading times off this raptor wouldnt much differ from a massive 7200rpm with a fraction of the $/GB keep in mind that the market for these drives isnt consumers, the only reason that a "X" series is being introduced is the overwhelming enthusiast response to the last series of raptors, given that overwhelming response, id say there isnt an issue with the price
/me wants! However I doubt I can sensibly afford one (I could buy one but I'd be unable to afford food by the end of term, now theres a trade off....). Would like to replace my 36GB raptor with something quicker though though anything more than 74GB capacity would be wasted really.
Yes, but that review doesn't really tell me whether it's going to save me minutes on level loading times or seconds. Does it? I'd like to know whether it will make massive improvements to my game/application loading time - most things I do these days involves CPU/memory intensive tasks. Opening programs could be sped up, but is it going to kill me if I have to wait a couple of milliseconds longer for Photoshop to open? I'd much rather slap an extra 2GB of RAM in my system and have a Barracuda 7200.9 given the choice between the Raptor with 2GB of RAM and the Barracuda 7200.9 with 4GB of RAM if I was into heavy Photoshop work. I could live with saving lots of dollar for a few extra seconds level loading time and having lots more space (or more memory), too. It's just hard to justify spending $300 on one, nevermind two. The 74GB Raptor is £116 over here, so I wouldn't expect this to retail for much less than £250 when it first becomes available. For that price, you can get a very big drive or three (nearly four) 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA II drives and have change to spare. If there's a widely-used consumer program, or series of programs that will categorically benefit from having a Raptor drive, I'm prepared to shut up. Until then, I feel that a fast drive (like this) is a bit of a waste of money.
its unlikely to save much time at all on something like level loading over a Hitachi 7k500. The raptor was never meant to be a consumer drive, so WD was never worried about "will customers be able to justify the cost". Its appeal was the low-cost of SATA compared to scsi and the comparatively low cost of the raptor compared to competing 10k scsi units. Therefore the raptor is actually a budget drive (although a bit more mainstream now that SAS is catching on) ocuk have it pre-order ar £223, but im not sure how much I'd trust that once they're availible
based on OcUK's invisible X1800 cards, I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw you (that's probably not very far).
not far at all, I've put about 1/2 stone on since you last saw me as well Id be inclined to trust them even less than that, possibly as far as I could throw you
alright, unless ur going to hardcore its rediculas why would you spend the extra for that little gain in performance. I mean I would love to own one of these too but I can go and get a decient hdd for less that performs just under that drive. Tho thankfully I can now go to the 74 gig being as it is going to drop in price. I am having to live with the 36 gig right now.
£250, pff, I'd rather was my money on one of those DDR drives and KNOW I have a performance increase. Tims right though, it's not really "real world" and only seems a touch faster than the 74gig variety in the "hardcore" benchmarks at SR. I doubt there will be a noticable difference.
http://www.wdraptorx.com/partners/ I never thought I'd see the day when hard drives became l33t I think that just about covers every component now, hold optical drives (unless someone knows of an optical drive that has windows or shiny lights) $50 for a tiny little window? what a joke tbh Its the same firmware as the server drive, it would make sense if the firmware was better tweaked for dekstop use, but apparently thats too much hassle
they'll be on my shopping list as son as they re think that price...seriusly, you'd have to be uber hardcore, or a total idiot, to warrent paying £££'s for minimal real time saving. i'd rather have 2 bigger slower drives.....less heat, more capacity, raid. just my 2 pence worth
technically speaking, I dont think any drive conforms to the SATA2 standard, the term is commonly used to simply mean a 300MB/sec interface The new raptor has many, if not all of the features of SATA2 bar the 300MB/sec
yeah, thats because thats what it is (150MByte anyway), however it still has many features of the SATA2 standard The raptor X has inspired me to get a new rig: X2, XE or FX processor with an XP-120 XFX XXX graphics card raptor X Geil Ultra-X ram X-Connect PSU X-Fi, maybe X-Mystique SilenX fans Logitech Ultra-X & MX-1000 windows Xp what a sad state of affairs edit: just found some speakers for it made by X-Tensions
