WD Raptor 10k ATA reviewed @ SR

powergyoza · Post by **powergyoza** » Fri Mar 07, 2003 12:36 am

Not totally worth a submission to the homepage, but I'll mention it here.

StorageReview reviews a preproduction model of the new WD 10k ATA drive. Link: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2 ... 0GD_1.html

Noise level readings were low, but they could hear a high pitched whine. Faster than a lot of 7200 rpm ATA drives, but not as fast as the WD Caviar JB series. Certainly not as fast as the 10k SCSI drives, but hey, it's still beta.

Who's gonna go for one of these? It could probably be quiet if it was put in a SmartDrive or something.

ez2remember · Post by **ez2remember** » Fri Mar 07, 2003 4:06 am

I just wonder if it is just a SCSI drive using serial ATA interface which would explain the small capacity found commonly with SCSI drives.

Anyway atleast serial ATA gives us the chance to get very high rpm hard disk but noise and heat, one is to guess what would happen?

jamoore9 · Post by **jamoore9** » Fri Mar 07, 2003 11:27 am

AnandTech als did a very comprehensive look at this drive, comparing it to all the leading IDE drives and 2 10K SCSIs. It didn't do very well at all, because Anand didn't stop with synthetic benchmarks, but recorded read-write commands to the drive and the drive's performance with them during "suite" benchmarks, to get an idea of real-world performance differences (sort of like the difference between running a 3dMark synthetic benchmark on a GPU and getting a a score, and running a demo in Unreal Tournament 2K3 and getting a max FPS rate).

The WD special edition drives weren't the only ones that outperformed it. Pretty much all of the top IDE drives did better, even the Cuda V. He also mentioned that the high-pitched whine is WORSE than the SCSI's that they compared it to (and those AT dudes are NOT silent PCers by any means).

Also, Anand doesn't think that its a souped up SCSI with an SATA interface. But I'll let him explain that:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1795

jinu117 · Post by **jinu117** » Tue Mar 11, 2003 11:03 pm

UPDATE on SR is available.

NONE of the IDE drive can touch production Raptor (or near production) ina any single aspect of drive testing. (other than sheer size that is)
In fact, some of 15000 RPM SCSI turned out to be less of performer than Raptor unless used for server benchmarking. Can't wait till I can get my hand on 2 platter one (about 70-80 gig is my guess). If the high pitched whine is problem, I would just go get smart drive for this babies.

powergyoza · Post by **powergyoza** » Tue Mar 11, 2003 11:58 pm

In this comparison between Raptor and 7200rpm ATA competitors everything gets smoked! Even the beta raptor gets embarassed! 75% improvement in the high-end score, cripes!

Post by **Rusty075** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 12:35 am

Shows how big a difference write caching and firmware can make.

jamoore9 · Post by **jamoore9** » Wed Mar 12, 2003 7:15 am

AnandTech also re-reviewed the production version of this drive. Holy crap! It would take some serious sandwiching to make it quiet (as I said, even Anand thought the thing was loud, and their sound measurement standards are notoriously high), but this looks to easily be the fastest, cheapest (probably) drive for the desktop market.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1799

Badashmods · Post by **Badashmods** » Tue Mar 25, 2003 6:49 pm

They say they have it in stock here:
http://www.widgetsinc.com/shop/page27.html

I don't belive them though, I'm thinking of trying one in a smartdrive, just wish it wasn't so small.

http://www.atacom.com/program/print_htm ... SER_ID=www