Looks like the rumours were true. Basically a cheaper alternative to SCSI with very good reported seek times. More info here I would love to set up three of these in a RAID 5 array with a 2-4GB rocketdrive for anything that could benefit from 0.6 microsecond access time. That be 500 times faster than a seagate 15K.3 Ultra 320 scsi drive.
I so need a couple of those They really will fly. I just hope they have fluid dynamic bearings, so they arn't too noisy
Nice I am tempted to start saving up for an uber HDD setup now, my PC does all I want games wise and sound wise atm, but faster and bigger harddrives would help (heres me stuck with a meagre 60Gb of space )....S-ATA would be a bonus as well (a bit more future proofing ) 2x 120Gb RAPTORs 1x PCI S-ATA channel card (or get a mobo with onbaord S-ATA, A78NX Deluxe would do nicely ) (Though saying this, one must see how S-ATA affects RAIDs performance and whether anyone else other than IBM can make drives that really benefit)
Will, note fro the info given at storage review that they are only available in 36GB versions. They will be around $160 each. 8-ball
There are several types of RAID array Lets take RAID 0....Striping its called. You take two (or more HDD), and effectively, one writes/reads half the data, while the other does the other half, so if you stored the alphabet, 13 letters would be stored on one, and 13 on the other. This should speed up data transfer Another type of RAID is RAID1, or mirroring, basically where you have two hard drives which are kept exactly the same, incase one fails.
RAID = Redundant Array of Independent (some people say inexpensive) Disks The onboard raid featured on mobo's is usually Raid 0 or raid 1. It basically involves using a controller to put several drives together which the computer sees as one individual drive. Depending on the arrangement used you can get different benefits. Have a look here for detailed info on the different types of raid. 8-ball
Only 36Gb and $160...Ouch!...hmm better must be damn good for that price, its nudging SCSI territory for £ per Gb there surely?
Yes. If you read the link I posted you will see that WD are aiming this drive at the low to mid range enterprise class market. That's not to say that it won't be useful to us. It offers many of the benefits which we, as enthusiasts, ie fast seek/access times aswell as the ability to work off onboard S-ATA controllers or cheap PCI controllers. Now compare this to SCSI which requires an expensive controller to implement an effective array, as well as very expensive cables and terminators. Aswell as this, most desktop motherboards, with only 33MHz pci can't take full advantage of the transfer rates of SCSI setups. Much more attractive to the high end desktop market than SCSI. Particularly with the 5 year warranty!!!!! My suggestion, get one of these as your primary drive, and get a cheap 200GB drive for mp3's and so on. 8-ball
so using striping [raid 0] even though the computer may see severall hdd's as one, physically they are more than one so if one fails! u have backup! but what use is half of the data? Spose its better than none! EDIT : I see striping is for performance purpose and is not classed as RAID as its not fault tolerant ^ excuse the stupid question above, but thanks for the explanation! Do the Nforce 2 boards support raid? if so does the a7n8x deluxe have any? and do u set the raid up using software or what? Im guessing usually only raid 0, 1 & 2 are used by most home users and most others are for business backup, etc?
No, if a drive fails in a raid 0 array, then you lose the whole array. However, you get to use all of the space. In a raid 1 array, you are only getting the space of a single drive combined with the security of knowing that if one fails you still have the information on the other. Kind of like always backing up as you go along. However, there is little performanec increase for RAID 1. 8-ball
Guess it serves me right for trying to find things to do other than my crucial coursework which counts for a substantial portion of my finals and has to be handed in on Friday. 8-ball
Onboard raid solutions are software based and use some of you cpu power to operate. However these are limited to RAID 0 and RAID 1 (and RAID 0+1 on some, but that is just applying raid 0 and 1 to 4 drives). PCI controllers come in two flavours, those which use the same chips as on onboard solutions, again utilising CPU power, which usually retail for £30-40, and those which use dedicated RAID processors, (no hit to cpu power), but retail for £150+ depending on how many drives you want to use and how much onboard cache you want. Up until now, thee are a very limited number of S-ATA RAID controller cards, though this will change as the drives become more popular. 8-ball
Back to the new WD drives; To be perfectly honest, I think WD deserve to be successful with this drive just for calling it RAPTOR 8-ball
thaks for the help 8 ball, and I agrre Raptor is an ace name! cant wait till we get bigger capacity ones!
There is a big discussion about this over at storagereview. It has been suggest by a couple of people that WD are sticking to a single platter design to initially cut down on development costs as well as keeping reliability up. Depending on how well received they are, we will probably be seeing more of these in larger capacities. As for the other drive manufacturers, there is little drive to try and create a 10K ATA drive. The WD version is not really aimed at the desktop market, rather the bottom end of the server market, in a hope to pinch a few customers (who can't afford full blown SCSI setups, yet need more reliability and performance) from the big SCSI manufacturers. Remember that WD don't have a SCSI division at the moment so they have nothing to lose from this move other than gaining market share from SCSI manufacturers. On the other hand, The other big manufacturers would be cutting into market share they already have. I may be completely wrong about this though. 8-ball
Simple, just set up a RAID 5 array with 11 of these little puppies. =360GB plus fault tolerance Oh hang on, that's right, that would be $1760 just for the drives and you'd have to find a six channel RAID controller. I think you could reasonably put $500 aside for something like that. 8-ball
Hhmmm, I'm still not convinced, tbh. So we have the 36GB WD Raptor with a 5.2ms average seek @ about $160 (which is not yet confirmed but what WD are 'aiming' for). A straight dollar pound conversion would yield about £100, but being realistic we could be looking at a £100-150 price tag. A quick little jaunt over to komplett turns up this. 36GB Seagate Cheetah with 4.7 average seek and 68 pin u320 interface. The price? A shade over £150. IMO WD are taking a gamble because they have no SCSI/FC market to lose. Which can only be good, because it introduces competition, but I sincerely doubt anyone at Hitachi or Seagate is losing sleep over this (unless someone's beating them over the head with a new Raptor ) This though, is definately a move in the right direction. Suddenly a 10k drive of decent size below 5ms AST on second generation S-ATA with high standard TCQ and bus disconnect actually looks like it could happen. When that happens, then I may migrate back to ATA. Oh, btw. After you prepare yourself for a little shock, check out this 12 port S-ATA RAID controller.
