question regarding the 10k WD SATA HD

Tommy

Jungle Guide

Join Date: Oct 2005

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I have read many great view about the WD 10KRPM HD. I am considering getting one of them for christmas. but before i place my order in newegg. i wanna ask if anybody in forum actually own this HD. there any of you really do. I wanna ask you if it really worth the money and how good the HD really is. I currently alreayd own a 320HD and a 250HD HD. i just need a fast drive to install my window and applications. THX in advance

Mushroom

Mushroom

Lion's Arch Merchant

Join Date: Aug 2006

Alabama

The 10k drives are mostly used in situations where drive performance is critical. Video capture and editing, servers, and things like this. Most of the times I use them in systems, we use a 10k drive for the boot drive, then 7.2k drives for storage and non-critical programs (Word, and things that are not used often or where the speed is not of a benefit).

If you are going to use a 10k drive, make sure that it has really good cooling. Those drives run really hot, and will fail fairly quickly (around 1 year) if they are not properly cooled.

Lurid

Lurid

Jungle Guide

Join Date: Mar 2006

Mo/

Yep, they can deffinately run hot. I personally reccomend the new 7200.10 Perpendicular HDDs. 250GB and 320GB flavors IIRC, and a single one vs a single raptor is almost on par, but is cheaper and runs cooler.

MegaMouse

MegaMouse

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Join Date: Jan 2006

south mississippi

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I have 2 raptors in a raid 1 configuration Mirrored for data security). They can and do run a bit on the hot side, but a fan in front of them can help out rather nicely. These are the fastest drives available for the consumer desktop at the moment (scsi is too expensive and not many consumer level mother boards support them). I am quite happy with them and will recommend them to anyone that asks. Make sure you get the correct one for your system (sata or EIDE). Also make sure that you get the newer ones with the 16meg cache.
Mega Mouse

Rakeris

Rakeris

Frost Gate Guardian

Join Date: Jan 2006

Illinois

Feners Reve

I have one as well, it's very nice. Mine has always ran cool (or maybe it's the double case fan in front of it...), and I love it, windows/linux boots noticably faster, and the loading times on some games is shorter. I've had it for about a year now.

Tommy

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Join Date: Oct 2005

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I want the 150GB one for a single drive setup, i am not a big fan of raid since i dont even have a floppy anymore.. i have good cooling<3x120MM fans> but my question is that will the new Drive improve my gaming experience? If it does by how much?

cannonfodder

cannonfodder

Tech Monkeh Mod

Join Date: May 2005

Good Old North East of England

Mo/Me

They are fast drives, and your games will load a little faster but it won't be that noticiable, I would rather recommend something like a samsung spinpoint, seagate barracuda, for the price you pay for a 150gig raptor you could get 2 decent sata/sataII drives.

I have raptors in my other 2 PC's, and they are fast, but also very noisey, that is also another thing to take into consideration, my seagate is virtually as fast but is deathly quiet, and if i'm honest doesn't seem that much slower. Raptors were originally meant for use as server drives, hence why WD concentrated on pure speed rather than noise reduction..

vaxmor

vaxmor

Krytan Explorer

Join Date: Dec 2005

Ascalon

R/

I have a raprot, its godlike. But, Id only buy one if your system if fast - no point putting it in a crappy 1/2GB onboard gfx P4 system. It will only be an efficient upgrade if you have a fast system that can really take advantage of it. otherwise spend your money on upgrading something more vital.

Mushroom

Mushroom

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Join Date: Aug 2006

Alabama

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tommy
I want the 150GB one for a single drive setup, i am not a big fan of raid since i dont even have a floppy anymore.. i have good cooling<3x120MM fans> but my question is that will the new Drive improve my gaming experience? If it does by how much?
Other then loading a bit faster, you will probably not notice any difference.

Games rarely get an advantage of 10k drives, because they are not incredibly intensive in read-write functions. They spend far more of their time rendering graphics or sending-recieveing data through the internet.

The reason I put them in servers and AV recording systems is that they can take advantage of them. These tasks are very heavy in reading-writing data, and every little bit helps. Not much sucks worse then getting to the end of a 2 hour video render, only to have the buffer run out of data and screw it up.

MegaMouse

MegaMouse

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Join Date: Jan 2006

south mississippi

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To tell the truth I dont think that Western Digital offers the Raptors in a 150 gig trim. The only ones that I am sure of are the 32 and 74 gig versions. I am not saying it isn't out there I just haven't seen any. If you need the storage space that a 150 giog hard drive offers put a seccond drive in with the raptor and use it just for storage duties. Use tha Raptor as your main C drive with windows loaded onto it.

Mega Mouse

cannonfodder

cannonfodder

Tech Monkeh Mod

Join Date: May 2005

Good Old North East of England

Mo/Me

Quote:
Originally Posted by MegaMouse
To tell the truth I dont think that Western Digital offers the Raptors in a 150 gig trim. The only ones that I am sure of are the 32 and 74 gig versions. I am not saying it isn't out there I just haven't seen any. If you need the storage space that a 150 giog hard drive offers put a seccond drive in with the raptor and use it just for storage duties. Use tha Raptor as your main C drive with windows loaded onto it.

Mega Mouse
No, there are 150g raptors, perhaps if you just used google you may have found that out

linky = http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatal...ital_SATA.html

Mushroom

Mushroom

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Join Date: Aug 2006

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Of course, if you want the ultimate in speed, why settle for a mere 10k SATA drive?If you want the ultimate, you can get the Seagate Cheetah ST3300655SS.

This is a 300 GB, 15k SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drive, with a 16mb cache. And they are only $1,500. That is double the capacity of the 150 GB Raptor, and 50% faster as well.

MegaMouse

MegaMouse

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south mississippi

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As I said I haven't heard of the 150 gig raptors. Thanks for the info cannonfodder, when I got my first pair of Raptors all they made were the 32 and 74 gig units, but it is nice to know that they have the larger ones. As far as SCSI drives you must have a motherboard that will support that type of drive, and as I said in an earlier post most motherboards for the consumer do not support SCSI. You would have to either get an add-in card and hope it will boot from it, or get a server motherboard. The cost of SCSI drives is very prohibitive also so I cannot in good faith recommend them to anyone. As far as the raptors go I will highly recommend any of the sizes that are currently available. mMine are 2 years old and I have had no problems with them yet. They have been very reliable for me and this is after several rebuilds of my desktop (can't realy call it a desktop due to the fact that I use a full tower server case, this puppy is over 26 inches tall and has 14 bays: 6 internal for Hard drives 2 external 3.5" spots and 6 5.25 optical drive holes. It is the largest tower that anyone can get and I love it) and several reinstalations of Windows.

Mega Mouse

Mushroom

Mushroom

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Join Date: Aug 2006

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I was talking about SAS, not conventional SCSI. And yes, they are more pricey. I have seen SAS controller cards in the $200-250 range. And 74 GB 15k SAS drives run around $325.

Of course, if you want to go all-out, Tyan just released a motherboard with SAS built in. It is a quad Opteron board, so you can run 4 dual core Opteron chips (8 cores total), and blow everybody away. And the board is a deal, at around $1,550.

If you are more "budget minded", the Asus DSBF-D has SAS on-board, for just over $611. But it uses an LGA 771 Xeon processor, so that will set you back a bit. A dual core 3.73 GHz Xeon CPU is only around $1,100.

And of course, I am writing this and the previous post semi-tongue in cheek. But it does show how far you can go if you really want to be "bleeding edge". While most people talk about "Dual Core" and the upcomming "quad core", some of us are already working with "Oct core" (and more).

And yes, by the middle of next year, the first 20k SAS drives are expected to be out. Most estimates are that the 150 GB Seagate Cheetah 20k SAS will run around $2,750.

Tommy

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Join Date: Oct 2005

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just trying to buy myself something nice within 220 for x-mas.. not planning for a major upgrade yet.. anymore input for the 10k WD drives?

MegaMouse

MegaMouse

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As I said the SATA interface and the SAS interface are not compatible and they are out of the price range that most of us can even think about affording. Not to mention that you will have to have a SERVER motherboard or a SAS addin card to use them. The best bet for the poster of this thread is to get the 150 gig Raptor (I did some research and the reason that I didn't know about them is that they are rather new). That should handle his storage needs and give him the speed he wants. Plus they can be used with any retail motherboard that has a SATA controler.

Mega Mouse

awesome sauce

awesome sauce

Krytan Explorer

Join Date: Dec 2005

If you really want a fast drive for windows, consider this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815168001

Only 4 gb max (8 gb for a ton of money), but its the fastest "hard drive" out there.
Users report about 10 second windows bootup time. It's worth it if you have the money for this beast.

Tommy

Jungle Guide

Join Date: Oct 2005

Grotto,The Paradise of GW Afkers

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i actually have a friend with the Gigabye i-ram with 4GB DDR400 on it. It can boot up window instantly, but i want it to help me with gaming experience also.

Alias_X

Alias_X

Desert Nomad

Join Date: Apr 2005

That gigabye ram drive add on looks awesome!

MegaMouse

MegaMouse

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Join Date: Jan 2006

south mississippi

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I have seen the reports on the Gigabyte ram drives. They look interesting but the limitation will be how much ram you can afford to put into it. They are very fast but in order to keep windows on it you will have to keep power to the unit (I think that Gigabyte has an external power brick for the unit). Nice setup but not enough storage to be a serious replacement for a standard Hard Drive.

Mega Mouse

Mushroom

Mushroom

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Join Date: Aug 2006

Alabama

Quote:
Originally Posted by MegaMouse
As I said the SATA interface and the SAS interface are not compatible and they are out of the price range that most of us can even think about affording.
Not quite true.

**Danger - Technical Content**

SATA is simply a subset of the SAS standard. With a SAS controller, you can run both SAS an SATA drives. However, you can't mix and match them in a RAID array. You can combine both of them in a machine, but not on the same RAID array. I have seen people who use a 10k SATA for a boot drive, then an array of 15k SAS drives for high-speed redundent storage (database server for example).

However, you can't run SAS on a SATA array.

And be careful, because prices and standards change constantly. Ever since the 15K SAS drives came out, the price of 10k SAS drives has dropped, and they only run about 10-15% more then a 10k SATA drive. And when the 20k comes out next year, expect 10K SAS to be about the same price as a 10K SATA, and the 15K SAS to drop to where the current 10K rests.