Bradford, I agree that the price is high and for a little more you could get a 10K.6 of the same capacity. But then you have to consider the difference in cost of the controllers and the cables. SCSI cables are outrageously expensive. Then you need terminators on that as well. I think it will work out a little cheaper, and will attract a lot of business from people who want more performance but are not experienced with using SCSI and are frankly a little daunted by all of the variations and things that could go wrong. ATA, whether it be P or S is familiar, and that can only work in WD's favour in terms of selling to the desktop market. For low-mid range servers, I can see people using these where reliability is needed (just about everywhere) but the next criteria for selection is cost over performance. I don't think this is the move to 10K that everyone has been hoping for, yet. But the technology will mature, dropping the costs and introducing larger capacities. It's about time someone addressed the gulf in the performance gap between IDE and SCSI. RAID can only do so much, and only for applications where highe sustained transfer rate is an advantage, but it does not improve the seek time, the key figure with hard drives for regular desktop/gaming use. 8-ball
If this time we nip over to OCS, we find that rounded SCSI cables are marginally more expensive than P-ATA cables. S-ATA cables (in general) cost about the same as those SCSI cables (unless you buy from somebody like me). So to hook up a similar number of drives, S-ATA actually works out somewhere between the same and twice as expensive as SCSI cables. You don't always have to terminate, either. If you're just using one (SCSI) drive a reasonably suitable controller can be had new for as little as £65-£75 (about £30-£40 more than an S-ATA controller). There is still this myth that SCSI is this realm of dark magic that's impossible to understand without loads of research. That was one of the reasons I wrote this. The cost saving struggles to break triple figures when considering one or a few disks (which I don't consider a huge issue when talking about blowing over a hundred quid on a 36GB drive). That is, until we start talking about RAID. With more than a few drives, SCSI actually becomes the cheaper option. Like I said, don't get me wrong. This is a great move from WD which will inevitably drive the storage market forward and I'm happy that it finally happened. But there are serious shortfalls that you have to take into account. And that, I think concludes my rambling for a little while
I’m getting a Raptor as a boot drive and then getting another one at a later point and sticking them in raid. It better not have a CPU utilization of over 5% because that’s what my current drives do
Bradford, I guess I may have been a little enthusiastic about how expensive SCSI is, though as you said it is cheaper for several drives. Unless you are in the server market, I can't see anyone wanting more than a couple of these, maybe three. What I think would be more likely is a two channel SATA controller with one of these for the boot disk and anything else that would benefit from fast seek times and a large 7200 SATA drive for storage. That's probably the direction I would take. 8-ball
Going off track a little, I remembered this morning (when I should have been in bed ) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS ) will be using the same connectors as S-ATA. That means that while you can't use SCSI disks on an S-ATA controller, you can do the reverse on a SAS controller. Which I just thought was pretty cool.
its a little on the small side fast but small, now this... http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?action=info&p=26900&t=1762&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=9&GrpID=10&s=pl is what i want nice big cheap fast
Not actually that fast at all. It actually has a slower seek time than the parallel ATA version. Granted the 8mb cache gives it a little kick up the behind, but it's still nowhere near the WD caviar or IBM 180GXP for performance. The maxtor probably has better performance. If you're after silence, the IBM is almost as quiet, (still inaudible) yet has very nearly the performance of the WD Caviar. If you're worried about IBM's reliability after the 60/75GXP fiasco, go have a look at the Storage review reliability survey. You'll find that the 180GXP's predescessor, the 120GXP was more reliable than any of it's same generation competitiors from Seagate, WD and Maxtor. 8-ball
Im getting one of them aswell for games and backup Sod partitioning it as well... Must move to SATA, what can I say I like the red wires EDIT: In the future do you think mobos will have loads of SATA ports on them? Oh and will DVD drives/CD Writers come with SATA?
Now personally I see this as all a little pointless in a standard consumer system, why? PCI of course, most systems do not 64bit PCI, 66MHz or PCI-X, so are stuck with the regular 133MB/s bandwidth, which is a bad joke tbh. Get a few of these drives and you'll start pushing the maximum bandwidth of the bus before you hit the max bandwidth of Serial ATA. Depends how easy they are to implement on a board, they certainly don't take up much real estate, maybe in future vanilla boards may have two ports (Optical drive and 1 HDD), where as an enthusiasts board may have 6 or more. CD-ROM/DVD drives which eventually cross over to S-ATA when it becomes the standard.
The pci bus is plenty sufficient for a couple of these drives. The main advantage of 10K IDE drives is a reduction in seek times while sticking to good old IDE. I've also heard that Serial ATA is more reliable (any truth in this anyone) which is why it is gaining popularity over regular IDE in situations where loss of data is not acceptable, yet SCSI is not required. 8-ball
Dont u feel that eventually S-ATA will take over as the regular IDE on devices such as CD-R? Ok so it is limited by certain things at the moment like bus bandwidths, but when theses are adpated I believe in the future it is certainly gonna take off. Oh and im sure itl be cheaper than the Die Hard SCSI equipment! Anyone care to comment?
I also think that when the controllers become more commonplace, the prices will drop, and the price of the drives will definitely drop. 8-ball
Do u think the likes of WD will focus more on developing there S-ATA range or continue to push out higher capacity current P-ATA ones?
Remember that S-ATA is merely the interface. The reason that the raptor has such a low capacity is because it is a 10,000 rpm design. I believe that all of the big drive manufacturers will offer their coming drives with S-ATA. For example, the new Barracuda is available with a S-ATA interface. 8-ball
That maybe, but once you start adding other bandwidth hungry cards to the PCI bus it soons becomes saturated. Roll on something quicker, ! PCI Express would do.
I agree, it would be lovely, but unless you're prepared to get a dual Athlon mp based on an outdated chipset, you're stuck with it, and chances are it probably won't change for a while. 8-ball
The Intel 7505 chipset supports 64bit/66MHz PCI and PCI-X, no reason to go for an outdated Athlon solution, Still it wouldn't be as fast as a single P4 in most apps that people here would use. The new Intel chipsets are integrating SATA directly onto the motherboard, so bypassing some of the problems and I wouldn't be surprised if a fade out of PCI was imminent, hopefully it will be quicker than PCI (which I believe will still run under the PCI Express system).
