WD VelociRaptor

djBon2112 said:
I understand what you mean, though at least for a PSU it affects it (stable current is a must), I think that if you're already spending $2000 on hardware, why not go the extra $200 and get a decent upgrade to those things as well? It just makes for a more solid build in general, though that doesn't mean FPS, and to me that doesn't matter. Not everything is about getting 1 more FPS in Crysis ;)
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Another 10% in cost for what many would see (don't even try to argue that Raptor owners aren't a minority among a minority, here) as zero return on the investment is very difficult to justify.
 
silent-circuit said:
Another 10% in cost for what many would see (don't even try to argue that Raptor owners aren't a minority among a minority, here) as zero return on the investment is very difficult to justify.
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I don't think there has ever been an electronic component to exist that had anything above a zero return on investment. Unless you are talking about some weird antieque thing that some rich person with a nostalgic electronics fetish is willing to pay a premium for.

For example, you can buy functioning NES's for $10-20 on eBay, which is much lower than 0% ROI.

The VR's are enterprise/ enthusiast class drives. If you don't want the absolute best performance you don't buy it or a SSD, plain and simple.

Anything electronic/ computer/ game related are not investments.
 
silent-circuit said:
Another 10% in cost for what many would see (don't even try to argue that Raptor owners aren't a minority among a minority, here) as zero return on the investment is very difficult to justify.
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But how do you refine ROI in terms of a computer? Does it HAVE to mean 1 or 2 more FPS, or can it be something more? I personally see a ROI if it means my computer boots 10 seconds faster, or a game or app loads initially 5 seconds faster. Does that justify the cost? Depends; if you're throwing money out there anyways on the best of the best, why not make it all the best of the best? But I don't know: I've never had $2000 to blow on a computer.
 
I think all the reviews out there on the Net are based on engineering samples which are using 'beta' firmware which still has room for improvement. Therefore its still too early to tell unless its available at retailers and e-tailer stores.

I'm currently using 4 x Savvio 10k.1 36GB in Raid 0for for my OS drive using a LSI MegaRaid 8344ELP. The response over 7200rpm hdd is significant, but slower than what I used to have when I was using a pair of 15k.4 146GB Cheetahs in Raid 0. The only complain i have for me is that my SAS Raid controller becomes very very hot with its passive cooling.

So for me, i'll wait for the review of the retail Velociraptor before i make a decision to dump SAS. And also, I would like to see some benchmark results comparing Velociraptor against 15k.1 Savvio as single drives and in Raid 0.
 
We have been discussing how the 7200.11 currently beats the Raptor on my clan's forums, but it is a sata 1 compared to a sata 2, which mean halving the bandwidth. My theory is that once the VelociRaptor brings sata 2 to the raptor series, the VR will dominate the 7200.11s. My thread is located here:
http://ckwgaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=1824.0

There are some cool graphs towards the bottom, courtesy of Tom's hardware, illustrating my train of thought. Am I spot on in thinking that the VR will lead the sata 2 pack like the Raptor leads the sata 1 pack, or was my train derailed?
 
All your clan members seem to be looking at is sustained read/write transfers for the drives, but not so much as to the access time of the drives. Read/write transfers are only one portion of the drive's capability, just as access time is just one portion of the drive's capability. The two together are what make a drive "fast and responsive."

The belief you hold that the drive interface being SATA 1.5 GB/s or SATA 3GB/s, or SATA 1 and 2 as you put it, will increase the speed of a drive is incorrect. SATA 1.5GB/s and SATA 3.0GB/s are just the maximum transfer speeds at that interface. It does not actually increase the speed at all, as the drive does not reach near those speeds during sustained transfer, only during short initial bursts of data transfer in the cache of the drive.

Also, you are comparing different drives in your forum thread, but are not looking at platter densities. Platter densities or more specifically areal density (the amount of data that can be placed onto a storage medium), is what affects transfer speeds. The greater the areal density, the higher the transfer rates will be. This is why newer higher density hard drives such as the higher capacity Seagate 7200.11's, WD's 6400AAKS or 3200AAKS, or the higher capacity Samsung F1 series of drives can "beat" the Raptor at file transfer tests. The fastest drives of those lines have approximately 320GB platters (not the exact density for each line).

So basically, I just wanted to correct your beliefs. As you suspect, the new VelociRaptors will "dominate" the 7200.11's now that Western Digital was able to introduce a Raptor that has fast access times and high transfer speeds, but not due to the change in the interface of the drive, but due to the higher density platters of the drive.

Master_Pain said:
We have been discussing how the 7200.11 currently beats the Raptor on my clan's forums, but it is a sata 1 compared to a sata 2, which mean halving the bandwidth. My theory is that once the VelociRaptor brings sata 2 to the raptor series, the VR will dominate the 7200.11s. My thread is located here:
http://ckwgaming.com/forums/index.php?topic=1824.0

There are some cool graphs towards the bottom, courtesy of Tom's hardware, illustrating my train of thought. Am I spot on in thinking that the VR will lead the sata 2 pack like the Raptor leads the sata 1 pack, or was my train derailed?
Click to expand...
 
GJSNeptune said:
Hell, 300GB is too much for an OS drive
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are you kidding me? i installed all my software, a few (10 or so) games on vista... over 230GB (thats day 2 of my vista reinstall, goddamn spyware.. last time i let somebody use my pc unattended.. yeah i dont mind click that shit, win your free fkn ipod)... that leaves only 70GB for my desktop and future software/games (Wayyyyyyy to small, as i am lazy)

2 in raid would be sweet tho.. but too expensive.. personally i think i'll wait for some decent low-power high-speed SSD drives... i've installed halflife2 entirely on a 4 or 5gb ramdisk (i forget) and load times werent even that impressive... really i see little point gettinng one of these as a gamer... and now i demux my video streams to a ramdisk anyways... so pointless IMHO... POINTLESS

I'd rather spend my $300 on hookers and blackjack :D (note: i dont do either, both go against my morals, well gambling and hookers, not necesarily blackjack)
 
Aix said:
Meh, I was hoping you'd do some damage with this article Kyle. Seems like a good topic to apply the "real world game testing" philosophy. Take some games and compare load times, especially some notorious ones like HalfLife2 where you have an unending spree of 'Loading...' messages.
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wow.. the very example i used.. hahahaha ;) i hadnt read that far...

i think cas the files are compressed.. the decompressing is the bottleneck.

i really dont think any ultra-fast drive is much benefit to [H]ardcore gamers...

better for [H]ardcore video editing

but if ur [H]ardcore like Quickdraw McGraw.. your already paying heaps for these drives for a little improvement.. why not pay a bunch more for noticable improvement.
 
djBon2112 said:
But how do you refine ROI in terms of a computer? Does it HAVE to mean 1 or 2 more FPS, or can it be something more? I personally see a ROI if it means my computer boots 10 seconds faster, or a game or app loads initially 5 seconds faster. Does that justify the cost? Depends; if you're throwing money out there anyways on the best of the best, why not make it all the best of the best? But I don't know: I've never had $2000 to blow on a computer.
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AND YOU NEVER WILL! :-P jokes sorry I gotta keep baging on you about your constantly maxed credit cards :p


Yea if you want the best of the best get some seagate cheetah 15k 6gen, man those drives so crazy.
 
Chilly said:
AND YOU NEVER WILL! :-P jokes sorry I gotta keep baging on you about your constantly maxed credit cards :p


Yea if you want the best of the best get some seagate cheetah 15k 6gen, man those drives so crazy.
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Only 1 credit card, and it's currently only at $2000 :p

/thread hijack :p
 
winston856 said:
I don't know why people are complaining about the price, the VelociRaptor has a better Price per Gigabyte than the current 150GB raptor @ $170/150GB.

What the kicker is though is these complainers spared no expense when building their boxes, SLI, quad cores and expensive RAM and Mobo's are littered throughout their sigs yet they won't buy a 300GB HDD that costs $300.... Not to mention how much more improved it is over the current models.

I am seriously considering buying one of these when the firmware is 100%.
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A hard drive isn't as important as other components in terms for gaming and such. A lot of folks would have more storage than faster storage... this is evident by the massive consumption of GP drives on these forums. Yes, it's fast, yes it's a decent price, but when you start thinking that you could buy an MTRON and a 1TB GP drive for example, the price and capacity does not seem so great anymore.

Dan_D said:
That's not entirely true. Hard drives don't impact FPS at all. So if you are gaming a really fast disk subsystem is only an after thought if its' even a thought at all. Motherboards don't really have any bearing on speed. At least not directly. The main difference between a cheap board and an expensive one is features. Essentially your video card, memory (to some degree) and your processor are the only things that really make a huge difference in performance. Even then CPUs reach a point of diminishing returns.

So yeah you'll see machines with $1200 worth of video cards on a $130 motherboard with a $200 processor and a $100 (or less) PSU.
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QFT. A lot of people think that the more they spend on components means that the faster or better it will be, a lot of the time they are buying into more features they will never use or brand naming.

[LYL]Homer;1032402753 said:
Blazestorm got me thinking:

2x 300gb VRaptors = $600 for a RAID 0 stripe, 600gb, assume onboard RAID controller.

4x 320gb (WD AAKS or Samsung F1) drives + Areca ARC-1210 4 port RAID controller = $600 with a RAID 5 or 0 stripe, 960gb

How badly does the 4 drive array get trounced?
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I got my money on the 4 drive array with the areca.

djBon2112 said:
I understand what you mean, though at least for a PSU it affects it (stable current is a must), I think that if you're already spending $2000 on hardware, why not go the extra $200 and get a decent upgrade to those things as well? It just makes for a more solid build in general, though that doesn't mean FPS, and to me that doesn't matter. Not everything is about getting 1 more FPS in Crysis ;)
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Well if you are spending $8,000 on a new computer, you might as well spend $2000 on a case? if you spend that much, why not get a tripple 30" monitors for another $6,000.... this logic is dangerous and can cost you a lot.

I bought into this logic for the longest time. My computer cost sits at over $8,000 and you know what? I can't justify it anymore. I can't justify spending more for the fact of "becuase everything else I spend so much on" logic. It burns money with very little results in terms of overall performance. Bleeding edge does not make for a more solid build in general, keep that in mind.
 
Ockie said:
Well if you are spending $8,000 on a new computer, you might as well spend $2000 on a case? if you spend that much, why not get a tripple 30" monitors for another $6,000.... this logic is dangerous and can cost you a lot.
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I would expect you to have a triple 30" monitor array by now. ;)
 
DemonDiablo said:
Considering raptors used to cost 3ish dollars a gig id say they're moving along in a pretty decent direction...
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Yeah, they are moving the right direction since
the 36Gb were $3+/gb
when I bought my 74Gb it was $2/gb
and now the current 150Gb & 300Gb's are $1/gb

I just thought they'd be moving a little faster in the right direction.
IE: it would be cheaper, considering the price/performance/Gb of the big drives now-a-days.

I think their own 640Gb (should be called T-Rex) drive is going to cannibalize their Velociraptor sales.

I do want to hear one of these in person, b/c I MIGHT get one of these for future build of an HTPC box if the noise is acceptable. I wonder if putting one of these in a HD Silencer would make it run too hot. My current 74Gb Raptor is in a silencer enclosure and it barely runs hotter than before.
 
chrisf6969 said:
Yeah, they are moving the right direction since
the 36Gb were $3+/gb
when I bought my 74Gb it was $2/gb
and now the current 150Gb & 300Gb's are $1/gb

I just thought they'd be moving a little faster in the right direction.
IE: it would be cheaper, considering the price/performance/Gb of the big drives now-a-days.

I think their own 640Gb (should be called T-Rex) drive is going to cannibalize their Velociraptor sales.

I do want to hear one of these in person, b/c I MIGHT get one of these for future build of an HTPC box if the noise is acceptable. I wonder if putting one of these in a HD Silencer would make it run too hot. My current 74Gb Raptor is in a silencer enclosure and it barely runs hotter than before.
Click to expand...
when the WD1500ADFD Raptors first came out they were $300
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1028808258&postcount=44

so we're starting at $1/GB compared to $2/GB for the last Raptor
so cost per GB is half, performance is about 30% higher, and both noise and heat have been reduced significantly
 
chrisf6969 said:
I do want to hear one of these in person, b/c I MIGHT get one of these for future build of an HTPC box if the noise is acceptable. I wonder if putting one of these in a HD Silencer would make it run too hot. My current 74Gb Raptor is in a silencer enclosure and it barely runs hotter than before.
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Just out of curiosity - not hating on the raptor why would you need/want this drive in an HTPC? If most of it's job is recording or serving up media, it seems that a small solid state drive paired with some large capacity drives or networked storage would be a much better choice.
 
Damn, i really want these to replace my current raptors but with the constant rising price of gas and food it isnt going to happen.
 
vsboxerboy said:
Just out of curiosity - not hating on the raptor why would you need/want this drive in an HTPC? If most of it's job is recording or serving up media, it seems that a small solid state drive paired with some large capacity drives or networked storage would be a much better choice.
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I was just thinking it was small & fast. So I could use it in a mini-itx box + slim DVD, etc... for a small /slim DVD player sized box. (maybe covert this old broken DVD player in to a stealth HTPC. etc MAYBE... down the road when the prices drop a little bit, and I can get something like a dual core Atom or CeleronM at a decent speed. I have a spare 1.33Ghz Celeron 215 mini-ITX board that I might start tinkering around with.
 
sanitarium16 said:
Damn, i really want these to replace my current raptors but with the constant rising price of gas and food it isnt going to happen.
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Sometimes you need to make sacrifices. Gas and food just might be those sacrifices. Or you could sacrifice a virgin, that would probably work too, now that I think about it... :p
 
Dan_D said:
Motherboards don't really have any bearing on speed. At least not directly. The main difference between a cheap board and an expensive one is features. Essentially your video card, memory (to some degree) and your processor are the only things that really make a huge difference in performance. Even then CPUs reach a point of diminishing returns. .
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so are you telling me that if i stick my core2duo in a 945 chipset, im going to achieve the same results as a x48 chipset?

On my last revival of my pentium4 3GHz prescott... i switched from a msi 865 neo board to some cheap asus board... my gaming went out the window... san andreas was ok IF you stayed on the ground.. fly a plane and you were screwed.. i used to run doom3 on ultra @ 1280x1024.. after it could barely handle it on high @ 1024x768.. so i dont know what you're talking about... northbridge makes a big difference..
 
gaspah said:
so are you telling me that if i stick my core2duo in a 945 chipset, im going to achieve the same results as a x48 chipset?

On my last revival of my pentium4 3GHz prescott... i switched from a msi 865 neo board to some cheap asus board... my gaming went out the window... san andreas was ok IF you stayed on the ground.. fly a plane and you were screwed.. i used to run doom3 on ultra @ 1280x1024.. after it could barely handle it on high @ 1024x768.. so i dont know what you're talking about... northbridge makes a big difference..
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Not necessarily. The differences won't be as earth shattering as you might think and overclocking will of course be far more limited. I was thinking more about the $100 boards out there that use the P35 chipset or the 650i SLI/750i SLI chipsets. Not all chipsets are created equal but there are plenty of $100 boards out there that will give you the same levels of performance as many $200 boards. The main difference between a $200 P35 board and a $100 P35 board is features and little to nothing else.
 
Waldorf said:
Yes, if you game at 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF or higher.
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well i think you'll be limited, but i agree if they both run smooth at standard resolutions then they'll upscale on gpu alone... but im sure you'll find games that will run on the x48 better, e.g. Crysis, theres a lot of cpu work in that one.


Dan_D said:
The main difference between a $200 P35 board and a $100 P35 board is features and little to nothing else.
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oh but thats apples to apples.. i realise you pay for features like raid, firewire, 6 stereo audio ports, optical out etc etc... though things like raid come standard on nvidia chipsets (making most amd systems much better for el cheapo servers... pretty sure even nforce405 chipset comes with raid

my board now for example has firewire.. which i'll never use...ever... firewire is redundant now, even dumped by apple, so what sort of future can it hold.. but i bought my full featured board cas i needed raid, plus a second pci-e 16x slot.. i wish i could remove a lot of things from this board, IDE, floppy, PCI, firewire, GSATA.. ugh its depressing i probably have $50 worth of useless features (wait not the GSATA im going to be using that within the month... 15 hdds total soon (plus 1 sata rom) including my XP32 raptor 36gb drive (yes i own a raptor, i thought it was good at the time, but now i think it was just a big waste of money)..

Dan_D said:
The differences won't be as earth shattering as you might think and overclocking will of course be far more limited.
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well the difference between my old 865 msi neo2 board and my 845 asus board WAS earth shattering difference on standard clock freqs, though i'll attribute a lot of that to the 845 not featuring dualchannel memory.. just 2 slots for single channel.


wait.. wasnt this about velociraptors.. i KNOW they dont affect FPS.. and because the texture / map whatever files are compressed you're going to be CPU bottlenecked rather quickly... i know this cas loading halflife2 and bioshock on ramdisks and running them really didnt give that much difference to load times, and definately NO difference in fps.. not that you could notice on my pc for those two games.. you cant get my pc to break a sweat no matter what settings these are on. i can even run HL2 perfectly while encoding video in the background :D:D:D

when i get 16GiB cranking i'll tell you how Crysis goes LOL

oh and with san andreas.. dropping the setting didnt really improve the performance opposed to the max settings.
 
there is some pretty cool stuff on the main site for this drive
not sure if this has been posted yet or not
http://www.wdvelociraptor.com/

also, anyone remember how long after the WD1500ADFD until the WD740ADFD was available?
I'm thinking I might have to pick up a WD3000GLFS now and later on switch to 2 x WD1500GLFS
 
holy crap, this is sweet. just when I think there's nothing left to upgrade, WD drops this on us. I hope we'll see more (retail) benchies and maybe a price drop before I'm totally in...but the foot is in the door so to speak.
 
EnderW said:
there is some pretty cool stuff on the main site for this drive
not sure if this has been posted yet or not
http://www.wdvelociraptor.com/

also, anyone remember how long after the WD1500ADFD until the WD740ADFD was available?
I'm thinking I might have to pick up a WD3000GLFS now and later on switch to 2 x WD1500GLFS
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It was VERY soon afterwards. I remember seeing benchies comparing them both side-by-side. I too, would much rather have the single platter, cheaper versions as I don't need the 2 platters. I really hope they come out with the 150's. Of course with everybody complaining about capacity, they may not do it all.
 
I just happned to browse the internet a couple of days ago right when they first hit the net. I already inquired to Western Digitial about installing it on a PS3. That kind of drive on a PS3 would be a real splitter with write and read times.


I havent got a response back from Western Digital. I have a feeling they werent expecting a same day email right when drive went to the internet. I will be getting one for my PS3 and also my PC. I have 3 150 raptors in my rig right now but this new breed is special especially if you can get it into a notebook...
 
mastercheeze said:
holy crap, this is sweet. just when I think there's nothing left to upgrade, WD drops this on us. I hope we'll see more (retail) benchies and maybe a price drop before I'm totally in...but the foot is in the door so to speak.
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You and me both. I thought I was done for a while....

taylor775 said:
I just happned to browse the internet a couple of days ago right when they first hit the net. I already inquired to Western Digitial about installing it on a PS3. That kind of drive on a PS3 would be a real splitter with write and read times.


I havent got a response back from Western Digital. I have a feeling they werent expecting a same day email right when drive went to the internet. I will be getting one for my PS3 and also my PC. I have 3 150 raptors in my rig right now but this new breed is special especially if you can get it into a notebook...
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that would be totally sweet, I don't know how big the ps3's drive bay is but if it is laptop size, then I doubt the raptor will fit in there, it is supposed to be a little larger.
 
zmjone2992 said:
that would be totally sweet, I don't know how big the ps3's drive bay is but if it is laptop size, then I doubt the raptor will fit in there, it is supposed to be a little larger.
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No fit: (well without semi major modifications)

ps3_open14_engadget_howto.jpg
 
One would think the reason this drive comes from the manufacturer with such a large heatsink would mean something. Now people are considering putting it inside things like a PS3 without any hope of decent cooling that could even compare to that factory heatsink?

You people have [H]ard balls, I swear... ;)
 
It should be fine in a PS3 heat wise, but it won't fit.

The reason the drive is 2.5" is for the server market. They will get the drive without the heat sink. PC enthusiast get the heat sink because it allows for easy mounting in their PC's.
 
Western Digital replied and they seemed very interested in what i had to say and the fact that people were wodering about the possibility of it slapped into a PS3. If im correct (correct me if im wrong) isnt the velociraptor 2.5 in spec but housed in a 3.5 heatsink.drive bay for desktops. I noticed the visuals I believe the drive mount can be removed via 4 screws underneath the drive bay. I also read somwhere else that the first gen drives wont be shipping with the drive attached due to some enterprise desktops wont be able to fit the drive bay. So, I am assuming the drive bay will be optional with a little difference in heat dissaption.

As for some you guys that dont think that the drive isnt a good idea for the PS3, I must humbly disagree. The original speed of the PS3 HDD is 5400 RPM and comapred to 7200 or a 10,000 RPM drive that would always give a speed increase. In the 7200 setup I read that the speed gains were marginal at best but if the veloci can fit I would only imagine that the speeds would be very diffferent than the 7200 counterparts.

As for the temps it seems that WD has a winner those temps wont harm the PS3. Sony has officially went on to state that they designed the ps3 HDD to be removable and upgraded to biggest and best notebook available when they come out. I am assuming that Sony had aleady known about SSD and the raptors coming to the notebokks when they designed the ps3.

Seriously this can only benefit the PS3 if its done right and adequate ventilation is aquired.
 
There's no way without extensive modification of the PS3 chassis. Way beyond what most would be willing to even attempt. It's too tall. Period, end of story.
 
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