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WD Velociraptor 10K RPM drive now available in standard SATA configuration!

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
This super fast drive has been available in a non-standard SATA connector location for a few months, but since it was non-standard it would not work in Mac Pro drive sleds. Apparently WD got their act together and machined a new sled for the drive that brings it into standard SATA connector location compliance, so will finally drop right into the Mac Pro or other standard drive bay sleds. Here it is at OWC:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD3000HLFS/
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Darn mine are in my optical bay side by side I have 2 of them . One for OS and the other for scratch. They work really nice too
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
Bummer. I just received 4 of the Seagate 1TBs. Very good drives, but I sorta feel like that juice commercial... "I coulda had a V8!"
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
TR, I wouldn't be too hard on yourself...

First off, these puppies run $329 each or about $1.10/GB, and your 1TB Seagates ran probably closer to $0.23/GB, or about 1/5th the cost per Gig. Second, these are 2.5 inch drives in a 3.5 inch case, and the outer rim speed of a 2.5 inch drive spinning at 10K RPM is about the same as a 3.5 inch drive spinning at 7K. The seek times on the smaller drive are better due to lighter arms and shorter travel distances, and I suspect this is where this drive gets its biggest boost over the latest technology 3.5 drives.

Bottom line is if you run a lot of intensive I/O operations, the cumulative advantage of the Velocirator will probably show up, but for most basic "launch and run" applications I doubt the difference will be earth-shattering.

I think this drive is maybe an ideal single drive solution for paging or CS scratch where somebody wants a quick and easy performance boost, but any current 2-drive stripe would likely outperform it. Of course if one were to stripe a pair of these little drives for scratch, that would probably be a screamer for large file processing in Photoshop. The issue then becomes the old cost/performance tradeoff, and I doubt the extra speed you might see on some really large file manipulations would be worth the cost... Basically, I'm saying I think you chose well :thumbs:

Cheers,
 

Bob

Administrator
Staff member
And for you hardware raid folks:
Try the Seagate Cheetah ST3300656SS 300GB 15K drive in a four way stripe.
These transfer from buffer to drive about 30% faster still.
Oh, and just forget about partitions, or other schemes for locating scratch. Just stripe these puppies and format to one volume and let CS scratch fall where it may.
-bob
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Bob's "THE MAN" when it comes to hard-drive and RAID questions!
 

TRSmith

Subscriber Member
I don't feel so bad now. Truth is, I use 2 of the drives in a Wiebetech hardware RAID 1 strictly to comply with a legal agreement with one design client. I use SuperDuper to automate a nightly backup and since I'm usually not around while it does its thing, speed isn't all that critical.

I do plan to expand my external drive capability though and dedicate a unit for photography. I'm thinking about the DROBO thing. Compared to the cost of my original Wiebetech Raid, a 4TB Drobo is kind of cheap. When I get around to that, I may go more for speed than security.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
A FWIW regarding speed on the DROBO. Due to the "smart" nature of the architecture, the throughput speed on the FW800 with 3 or 4 drives installed is about 50 MB/s; it should be considered a mass storage device and not a raw performance device. IOW, it's not nearly as fast a dedicated RAID 0 with the newest SATA2 drives, but essentially as fast as most FW 800 drives and thus fast enough for storage purposes. Anyway, the point is you can use almost any SATA drive in it and maintain that speed.

Cheers,
 
C

carbonmetrictree

Guest
Thanks for all of the info about the drive Jack, I've been lagging on hard drive research lately. My Raptor just crashed, so this might be a great replacement solution.
 
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