500gb drive faster than 74gb raptor???

S

Slade

2[H]4U
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Jun 9, 2004
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I've run HDTach in Vista over and over again.

Everytime I find nearly on par sequential reads for my 74GB raptor and my 500gb drive, and the 500gb drive leading as high as 199mb/sec on burst vs the raptor's 138mb/sec...

I only got the raptor as my OS drive for speed purposes, but it clicks loud compared to the 320's and the 500 I have.

Is their something wrong with HDTach in Vista or should the raptor be retired in favor of newer revision WD drives?
 
check out your seek times, i'll bet the raptor is better compared to your other drives. also, remember that hdtach will be reporting the performance of the drive as a whole, kind of like "how long would it take me to copy one big file to this drive" sort of way. well we all know that windows isn't one big file, but many small ones, and this is where the seek time comes in handy for having the raptor.
 
Just finished comparing those numbers, the raptor is clocking in 8ms while the 500gb is doing 13.6ms. Also of note the avg of the raptor is 77mb/sec while the 500gb is 70mb/sec.

It's demolishing my 320gb drive though overall, each one was doing a best of 56mb/sec.

Yeah I didn't read into the details, that something actually was faster on the 500gb kinda jumped out on me at first.
 
If you're looking at sequential transfers, the WD7500AAKS will be even faster than the Raptor, by a couple of MB/s, but the Raptor will still have lower seek times and more IOPS.
 
Performance is a function of (1) cache design, (2) access times, and (3) throughput.

Throughput is most affected by platter density. Newer 7200rpm drives with 250Gb and 320Gb platters should offer superior throughput compared to the 10,000rpm Raptor, but they won't match the access times.

The new 320Gb WD3200AAKS-00B3A0 based on a single 320Gb platter provides throughput of 90.6MB/s but a seek time of 16.3ms, according to HD Tach.

A new Raptor 320/640 is based on this 320Mb platter design is coming this summer.
 
There isn't really as much random access going on as might be believed on a desktop machine, so the low seek speeds of the Raptors isn't enough of an advantage against large high-density 7200rpm drives nowadays. A Raptor 640GB would solve both of its problems of low density and low overall capacity, and will probably be a good bet; I'm not convinced that Raptors of the current generation are really worth it at the present time, though. You get such little storage for a debatable speed advantage.
 
I still love my 150gb Raptor X.

Noticeably faster in real world use because of the low seek times. Seek times make a big difference opening programs, files, folders, etc.
 
Grentz said:
I still love my 150gb Raptor X.

Noticeably faster in real world use because of the low seek times. Seek times make a big difference opening programs, files, folders, etc.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I think it's difficult to attribute that to the seek times.
 
The raptor is noticeably faster when you have multiple things going on at once, in my experience. I too did the benchies and thought, "oh man I wasted my money on this thing!" until the raptor died and I was back to the "high density" Seagate drive. It wasn't even close to the same.

Now that I have the (refurb) raptor in again, it's a noticeable difference. Whenever I had two or three things going on at the same time, the Seagate would just fall over and the system would hang or stutter while waiting for the disk to finish up. With the raptor, everything just keeps going smoothly, while I listen to the poor raptor sound like it's eating itself.

I don't know if it's seek times or what, but I no longer feel like I wasted money.
 
http://www.storagereview.com/ST3750640NS.sr?page=0,1
It is important to remember that seek time and transfer rate measurements are mostly diagnostic in nature and not really measurements of "performance" per se. Assessing these two specs is quite similar to running a processor "benchmark" that confirms "yes, this processor really runs at 2.4 GHz and really does feature a 400 MHz FSB." Many additional factors combine to yield aggregate high-level hard disk performance above and beyond these two easily measured yet largely irrelevant metrics. In the end, drives, like all other PC components, should be evaluated via application-level performance.
Click to expand...
 
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