Yeah, but it works with a drive over 400MB in capacity. Too pricy, but I'm sure it'll sell well. I'd much rather buy a pair (or trio!) of big drives and work towards my terabyte fileserver. IMO, too little too late, with the way HD is being touted and all; it chews through space too quick to make this useful to anyone but servers and people who do absolutely nothing but game. Yes, I have a "gaming rig", but I use it for everything else too - I just have a good graphics card.
The sad thing is that it is actually quite a decent setup! What is it with the letter 'x'? What makes it so special?!
technically speaking, its 89% more l33t than the average letter, its even quite a bit more l33t than Z in second place, which is 34% more l33t than average
Imagine 3 or 4 of these in RAID0 on a powerful PCI-E controller! they would totally kick some ass (like that bloke on at hardforums who has his 4.8Tb-12X400gb - disk system giving him figures of 361Mb/s in sandra!) looks good! mehopes that the enthusiasts quickly try and dump their 36gb and 74gb ones - cheaper ones for all us with less money (or some would argue more sense than money!)
Looks like a bit of a middle-runner to me: it doesn't do very well in the enterprise-class server drive market, and it's too expensive and big for the high-end PC market. Granted, if money's no object, then it's all gravy, but I think i'd rather just buy a WD740 and a 300 GiB drive to go with it tbh. I can see what they were trying to do, but it's not quite there. [edit] Also, for 50$ that window is bloody tiny, although I don't think many of us would have the cojones to do it to our own main-drives these days, considering they top £100 easy. [/edit]
Im not sure its possible to do a window mod on drives these days, they're too sensitive and the tolerances of new high-density platters are fractions of what they used to be
To be honest, I think were I wanting an uber fast hard disk(which doesn't appeal to me in the slightest, but each to their own), I'd rather get a 15k SCSI disk with a capacity under 20GB. It would probably cost less overall, and you can stick your OS and basic apps on it, and have considerably faster desktop performance then even a raptor could provide.
actually, the fastest single-user 15k drive, the Fujitsu MAU, is pretty much equalled in desktop performance by the new raptor. Im still all for 15k over a raptor though as id rather pay more per GB for a 15k drive thats 36GB (thats the smallest you can get these days) than have a minimum of 150GB and a higher overall price So the new raptor is as good as 15k on the dekstop, but the Fujitsu MAX is just around the corner...
It's SCSI, but theres no reason why you can't use it on a desktop, other then that you'd need a SCSI controller, but thats SCSI. It'll be intended at server environments no doubt, where SCSI actually seems to be dominant, in some bussinesses at least, over IDE and SATA, due to reliability, and lifespan.
Well it'd have to be a serious drive to beat the new Raptor on desktop solutions, plus i'd need a new mobo, and a decent SCSI card, so it'd probably work out similar to the Raptor-X... Even so, it'd be worth a look tbh.
Hence my earlier post. Any drive over a gig or so is destined to fail within a couple weeks. Mashie did a pair of 40GB's (I think) for the Y2K Bug, and while windows was installed successfully, that was as long as they lasted. They still looked quite snazzy, but were utterly useless for holding data. Basically, if the drive is big enough to hold any current game, it can't survive a windowing by an end-user. And it's not because end-users don't usually have access to class-100 (or better) clean rooms, it's because the heads or spindles tend to get knocked out of place by that picometer or two which is enough to kill them.
From what I've read, SCSI cards can be had very cheaply on the bay of E's, you'd only need a new mobo if you required another PCI slot, but if thats what you meant then fair enough. I imagine a top of the line best in the world 15k SCSI drive would beat a raptor in everything, some things maybe by not much in, but some things it would totaly pwn it in.
head-to-head-to-head with the new raptor, The Fujitsu MAU (the fastest 15k on the dekstop) and the Maxtor 15k2 (the fastest 15k for enterprise use) http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&devID_0=309&devID_1=277&devID_2=279&devCnt=3 The raptor and the MAU are pretty much neck and neck for desktop use (keep in mind the MAU is over a year old, and the next fujisu drive will likely overtake the raptor), but both of the 15k drives own it in server use. 15k SCSI drives are made for enterprise use, so the firmware is tweaked for seek-heavy operation and lots of heavy random access and deep queues. Desktop use consists of lots of localised, predictable and sequential access, where seek time isnt as important as a lot of reads can be done from cache. What I wouldn't give for a desktop tweaked firmware on a 15k SCSI... as for cheap scsi on e-bay, I wouldnt bother. The cheap drives and controllers on e-bay are several generations old and would be easily outperformed by a newish 7200rpm drive. Higher spindle speed does not always mean faster, SCSI does not always mean faster
Designed to appeal to the enthusiast market black, with a window - U Bet Shame the Led could not be fitted...... I think it's going to be an excellent drive (5 year warranty) that has to be good... http://www.wdraptorx.com/index.asp?bhcp=1
It'll be decent yeah, but a 5 year warrenty is nothing to go crazy over, thats standard with all seagate drives, and all maxtor server drives(like the Maxline III), I imagine other server drive brands are on 5 year warrenties too.
