Best option? I'm looking for a highspeed windows drive

[Mr.Guvernment]

Raptor for Main O/S whether 36g or 74g - it is fastest single drive set up you can get! - unless you go expensivee SCSI.

 

[jcw122]

Highspeed IDE drive....LOL what is that.

I'd go for a Western Digital Rapter SATA also, if u have the $$$ that is.

 

[larva]

larva, what do you mean its not a native SATA device? Whats the "T" stand for?

Quite simply, it is an IDE drive with an IDE-SATA bridge. Not that this has huge performance implications, but it is fact. The main performance issue is that non-native drives cannot support NCQ, a factor that is just now becoming functional. It doesn't turn 7200rpm drives into 10,000rpm ones, though.

The "T" in TCQ stands for tagged. Tagged command queing is a multiuser benefit, but actually hurts single-user desktop performance. It has been implemented for years in SCSI drives designed for server use. For our use, TCQ=bad, NCQ=good. The biggest thing NCQ means is that you are talking about a native SATA drive, which at this point means you are also talking about the most recent drive mechanism. Other than rpm, this is the single largest factor (with the interface being a somewhat distant third).

 

[JoT]

Anyone hear of a new drive coming out to finally topple the Raptor? I'm sure that there's one coming along soon.

 

[Radical]

I've heard of parallel drives from Seagate, anyone know when they're due out?

 

[jjv687]

Thanks larva, you sure do know a lot about hard drives

Yea it is interesting that after all this time that the Raptors have been out, no other manufacturer has stepped up the the plate and released any competition.

 

[larva]

Yea it is interesting that after all this time that the Raptors have been out, no other manufacturer has stepped up the the plate and released any competition.

Other manufacturers are at present still imprisoned by what I call "cheap think". While economy is the real motive in most people's buying decisions, it is not the only factor for all users. WD has demonstrated that there is room in the market for a drive that is not the cheapest, and I can't help but believe that the Raptor product manager is a big star around WD these days. Sometimes making the best product actually translates into profitablility, a fact lost on so many executives and the companies they compose.

 

[tom10167]

I've heard of parallel drives from Seagate, anyone know when they're due out?

The fawl.

 

[laynlow]

Maxtor's 3 year warrantied Maxline III with 16MB cache meets the performance level of the Raptor.

I haven't read anything that said a Maxtor with NCQ and 16mb cache bests a Raptor. Plus, to enable NCQ I would have to format and reinstall everything after first enabling NCQ in the bios. Too much of a hassle for a small benefit.

 

[Speciale]

Other manufacturers are at present still imprisoned by what I call "cheap think". While economy is the real motive in most people's buying decisions, it is not the only factor for all users. WD has demonstrated that there is room in the market for a drive that is not the cheapest, and I can't help but believe that the Raptor product manager is a big star around WD these days. Sometimes making the best product actually translates into profitablility, a fact lost on so many executives and the companies they compose.

I truely wonder though how big of a market "we" are. I'm about to build my boss a PC for photo editing (as he owns a studio and i'm helping them convert from film to digital). If i were to mention the raptor he'd say "Why would i want to spend $180 on a 74 gig drive when i can get a 200 gig drive for the same price or less?"

Is there any info anywhere that shows how much of the market belongs to Dell/gateway/compaq/hp/sony etc. And how much of the market builds their own.

I mean, truely, go buy a Dell and the only name parts you see in it are "intel" and "Maxtor" of which the biggest thign they advertise is its size.

Correct me if i'm wrong.

 

[JoT]

Well, the Raptors are actually marketed as "enterprise" solutions, AKA, drives for servers.

 

[Speciale]

Well, the Raptors are actually marketed as "enterprise" solutions, AKA, drives for servers.

Which brings up another interesting point. Who is going to invest in a server and not "typical" server drives?

It's just a hard drive that seems to have a very small niche...us

 

[Speciale]

Ok, back on topic. I'm going to open a real big can of worms.

I dont want hearsay, give me some benchmarks here.

What would be quicker: 36gig raptor or two 40gig 8mb cache 7200rpm WD's in RAID 0?

 

[jjv687]

We've already discussed this in other threads. I'll just sum it up.
Raid 0 = faster transfers, slower access times
Raptor = faster access times, slower transfer speeds

 

[Speciale]

We've already discussed this in other threads. I'll just sum it up.
Raid 0 = faster transfers, slower access times
Raptor = faster access times, slower transfer speeds

Like i said, i'm sure it was a real can of worms, dead horse, etc...as long as everyone agrees to that, thats all i need

 

[ropey]

That being said, it is still so much faster mechanically than any 7200rpm drive that the native SATA interface of the Maxtor cannot overcome this factor. It's a really good 7200rpm drive, but it's not a Raptor.

With the MaXLine III, Maxtor has given users a good in-between point for those who want the capacity of a 7200RPM drive, but with the performance of Western Digital's 10,000RPM Raptor.

Weighing in at 250 or 300GB, a single MaXLine III drive should be more than enough for any desktop user and finally, such a large capacity can be had without a performance tradeoff.

The MaXLine III performs just as well as any of the fastest desktop hard drives available today, but when used with an NCQ-enabling controller, the performance potential is improved tremendously. Although we could only show it in one of our three multitasking tests, NCQ can have some pretty serious performance implications for those users who are running a lot of applications simultaneously.

Research and Benchmarks:


http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2094&p=13

My answer to the question was and is: Two Maxtor's in RAID > Raptors

R

 

[larva]

Unfortunately this just shows how close hard drive benchmarking comes to propaganda.

Sysmark and Winstone are useless. If you notice, in many of these results drives like the MaxlineIII and the R74 barely outperform stuff like the 120GB WD 7200rpm drive... Hardly conclusive. Take a stopwatch to those same drives, and the R74 slays them all.

But wait, they did do some stopwatch work after all. Look at the game loading tests. The R74 destroys all competition here, and if you know much about drive performance, you know that means it just plain destroys them period. Sure there are tests that will take heavy advantage of the drive's buffer and interface, but when you use these disks, the activity light still flashes merrily along. With each of those flashes the R74's mechanical advantages produce a disparity that the minor gains from advanced buffer and interface techniques can't hope to erase. And it's not like the R74's buffer and interface is particularly lacking, with the lack of NCQ the only serious issue to point to.

Benchmarking drives is perhaps the hardest and most poorly done aspect of PC performance evaluation, and that is really saying something. What passes for a "professional" review nine times out of 10 is completely ignores or masks the real differences in the products reviewed. If you want meaningful storage tests, go to Xbit Labs. I'm sorry but the reviews on both Anandtech and Storage Review depend far too heavily on canned tests like Sysmark. These kind of "record a drive activity and use it for 4 years" evaluations simply aren't representative of real world performance and don't come close to representing the actual performance differences easily enough demonstrated with a stopwatch.

 

[johan851]

Like i said, i'm sure it was a real can of worms, dead horse, etc...as long as everyone agrees to that, thats all i need

I agree.

Thanks for pointing that out, larva. I've been trying to argue that, but I lack the knowledge to make an effective point. There are a lot of good 7200RPM drives out right now, but in terms of the "feel" I got from moving from 7200RPM to 10,000RPM, there's no way a 7200RPM drive can beat the Raptor. It's simple mechanics.

Based on some of those benchmarks, a Raptor is as fast or even faster than some 15K solutions. If you've got a 7200RPM drive that's supposed to be comparable to the Raptor, that means...a 7200RPM drive is performing on par with a drive that spins at more than twice its rotational speed. That's just not possible.

 

[Speciale]

me thinks i'm going to get a raptor, raid has never interested me that much, unless it's two raptors i supose...which i cant afford

 

[larva]

I think you'll really like it, now that the Raptor is a FDB drive they are a really nice solution. I do think you would like two in RAID better, but the difference for most tasks is really minor and a single R74 certainly serves well.

In my experience a single top-drawer 7200rpm drive is good, two of them in RAID0 a touch better, and a single R74 a bit better yet. In the end a faster drive only helps overall satisfaction to a certain degree, but whatever that degree is, the R74 delivers it.