How old does the Raptor 74 have to get?

[Tostada]

I mean, honestly. I thought things were going in the right direction. I figured we'd have 15K SATA drives from multiple manufacturers by now. It's not that hard when the mechanical side has been taken care of for years. It wouldn't be difficult for Fujitsu/Seagate/Maxtor to all make SATA versions of their drives. People might say that the enthusiast market is too small, but I don't believe that. If the enthusiast market is big enough for motherboard manufacturers to have models like the LanParty and Fatality, then certainly the market is big enough for the big SCSI manufacturers to make desktop-tuned SATA versions of their high-performance drives. What gives?

I want to get a better drive for my machine, but I can't bring myself to buy a "new" Raptor when the things are so old. You can get the newest generation of 15K Fujitsu MAU for $200 these days (which I would certainly do if that wasn't the 36G version), so the Raptor isn't really all that good a deal anymore (although I'm probably only saying this since I already have an AHA-29160).

I just can't believe nobody's making any new performance SATA drives. WD will have to come up with something better before too long, since the 7200RPM drives are catching up.

 

[CalvinHobbes]

I think the market for SATA is in size which they can't do with a 10K or 15K RPM right now. I'd love to see something better. A raptor with SATA-II and 16MB cache would be great

 

[magomago]

increase in cache doesn't mean squat. Just because you toss on more cache for the HDD won't mean "Speedy" preformance~ what would be more important is the algorithm implemented. That and there will be a point where diminishing returns comes in for hard drives.... so saying somethingl ike "Oh i'm love STATA II and 16 meg cache" is akin to assuming the 9XX series Intel chips were better and faster than the 8XX series because "Oh a motherboard with DDR2 and PCI-E would be great"

 

[CalvinHobbes]

So why do the 16MB cache drives perform so well?

 

[Brian23]

I want to see Hard drives with a Gig of cache

 

[overst33r]

samsung recently announced they are going to release solid state hdd's for laptops. It might take a while for the capacity to grow... dont know if they will migrate to the desktop market just yet. read this article
http://theinquirer.net/?article=23425

 

[Pariah]

It wouldn't be difficult for Fujitsu/Seagate/Maxtor to all make SATA versions of their drives.

No it wouldn't, but just because they can, doesn't mean they should. It's not a coincidence that WD is the only drive maker with a 10k SATA drive. If you can't figure it out on your own, use the search enigne to find one of the 9 billion threads on this subject.

People might say that the enthusiast market is too small, but I don't believe that.

Just because you don't want to believe it, doesn't make it false. There is no enthusiast hard drive market. Never was, never will be.

You can get the newest generation of 15K Fujitsu MAU for $200 these days (which I would certainly do if that wasn't the 36G version), so the Raptor isn't really all that good a deal anymore (although I'm probably only saying this since I already have an AHA-29160).

You're contradicting yourself. If you can't afford the Fujitsu, then the Raptor still is a good deal, since something you can afford is obviously a better deal for you than something you can't. If you can't pay, you don't get to play.

WD will have to come up with something better before too long, since the 7200RPM drives are catching up.

WD doesn't care, since you were never the target market for the Raptor. The Raptor still kicks the hell out of the competition in the lowend enterprise market it was intended for, so there is no pressing need to update it.

I think the market for SATA is in size which they can't do with a 10K or 15K RPM right now.

10k drives are up to 300GB while 15k are at 147GB, those are big enough from almost everyone.

So why do the 16MB cache drives perform so well?

I'm only aware of one 16MB SATA drive currently available, and the reason it is faster is because it is newer. WD has announced a 16MB drive, don't know when it will be available though. The fastest drives on the planet, the current generation of 15k SCSI drives, don't use 16MB of cache. So that should tell you what drive manufacturers think of the additional cache. It's unlikely they would cut corners on their highest end products if a couple dollars of additional cache would offer any respectable performance increase.

 

[Ronin]

SATA II > Raptors, even with the lower RPM.

Plenty of reviews out there reflecting as such, too. I think the only thing a Raptor has better is a faster seek time.

 

[Pariah]

Everyone's new favorite 16MB cache NCQ enabled SATA II Maxtor Maxline III vs the ancient has been Raptor:

Raptor and Maxline III


Make sure to scroll down to the Server Suite:

SR File Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 226 IO/sec
Maxline 135 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 67%.

SR Web Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 238 IO/sec
Maxline 137 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 74%.


7200 RPM SATA is catching up to the Raptor? Maybe, but at this rate of gain it will be another 25 years before it equals it. Again, the Raptor is not designed to be an enthusiast product and is still beating the hell out of 7200RPM SATA in the market it is actually intended for.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Pariah
No it wouldn't, but just because they can, doesn't mean they should. It's not a coincidence that WD is the only drive maker with a 10k SATA drive. If you can't figure it out on your own, use the search enigne to find one of the 9 billion threads on this subject.

Exaggerate much? What search terms are you using? I didn't find much for "Why the hell is there no new Raptor in 2 years."

People might say that the enthusiast market is too small, but I don't believe that.

Just because you don't want to believe it, doesn't make it false. There is no enthusiast hard drive market. Never was, never will be.

That's a pretty ignorant thing to say. Again, look at the motherboard market. There are all kinds of products made specifically for the enthusiast market. The market exists, and for hard drive manufacturers tapping into that market simply means adding the SATA interface to existing products. I'm probably missing something, because it just doesn't make sense, but if you have some kind of legitimate reason for this maybe you could elaborate on it instead of just being an ass and saying stuff that makes no sense.

You're contradicting yourself. If you can't afford the Fujitsu, then the Raptor still is a good deal, since something you can afford is obviously a better deal for you than something you can't. If you can't pay, you don't get to play.

Learn to read. I never said I couldn't afford the Fujitsu. To the contrary, I said I could afford the Fujitsu, which makes the Raptor seem like a waste.

WD doesn't care, since you were never the target market for the Raptor. The Raptor still kicks the hell out of the competition in the lowend enterprise market it was intended for, so there is no pressing need to update it.

If WD doesn't care about the desktop market, why is the Raptor tuned for non-server performance? Until the latest generation of 15K drives, it was hands-down the best thing you could get for the desktop because it is optimized for non-server use. Its server performance is weak. You're pretty condescending for a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.

If you put half the effort into content that you did into being a dick, that post might have been helpful. As it stands, it's certainly not.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Everyone's new favorite 16MB cache NCQ enabled SATA II Maxtor Maxline III vs the ancient has been Raptor:

Raptor and Maxline III


Make sure to scroll down to the Server Suite:

SR File Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 226 IO/sec
Maxline 135 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 67%.

SR Web Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 238 IO/sec
Maxline 137 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 74%.


7200 RPM SATA is catching up to the Raptor? Maybe, but at this rate of gain it will be another 25 years before it equals it. Again, the Raptor is not designed to be an enthusiast product and is still beating the hell out of 7200RPM SATA in the market it is actually intended for.

That post was worse than the first.

The Raptor's server performance is bad. If you want to talk about the File Server and Web Server scores, let's talk about them.

File Server DriveMark:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

Web Server DriveMark:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

In both lists, the Raptor is almost dead last among 10K drives. It gets beat by every single current model. The only 10K drives that the Raptor can beat in server performance are two-generation-old drives from 2001.

I know you'd prefer to only look at two benchmarks which you've twisted for your own purposes, but let's look at all the benchmarks on StorageReview for the Raptor vs. Maxtor's Atlas 15K and MaxLine III:

http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...0=279&devID_1=267&devID_2=269&devCnt=3

Do you notice something? The Raptor doesn't win a single benchmark. The 7200 RPM MaxLine III does beat the Raptor in many things.

Maybe that's unfair. Let's compare the Raptor to a current 10K SCSI drive and the 7200RPM MaxLine III:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...0=278&devID_1=267&devID_2=269&devCnt=3

Looks like the Raptor actually wins the "end" transfer rate by a little! It still loses the max transfer rate by a large margin, though. It still loses every server benchmark to the SCSI drive and loses the desktop benchmarks overall to the 7200 RPM MaxLine.

OK, now let's just look at the two drives you were comparing, the 10K Raptor and the 7200RPM MaxLine III:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...ves=1&devID_0=267&devID_1=269&devCnt=2

The 7200RPM drive beats the Raptor pretty badly in non-server performance, which is pretty impressive when the Raptor's access time is so much better.

So, as far as server performance goes, the Raptor is slower than every 10K SCSI drive. As far as non-server performance goes, the Raptor is slower than the 7200RPM MaxLine III. Wow.

 

[Pariah]

I didn't find much for "Why the hell is there no new Raptor in 2 years."

Probably because that's not the topic I was referring to. There are 9 billion threads on why WD is the only drive maker making a 10k SATA drive. That should have been rather obvious based on the one line I quoted for that comment. I guess not to you though.

That's a pretty ignorant thing to say. Again, look at the motherboard market.

And what bearing does the maotherboard market have on the hard drive market? None that I'm aware of. There never has been a hard drive enthusiast market, and there likely never will be. There are 5 current major HD makers and none make enthusiasts hard drives. Coincidence? Either all their market analysis is wrong or you are wrong. Based on how much market research you have likely done, I'm going to pick the drive makers being right.

Learn to read. I never said I couldn't afford the Fujitsu.

Yes you did, you said the $200 version was only 36GB. Well, there is a 72GB version (and a 147GB as well). If money is not the issue as you say, then buy the 72GB version.

If WD doesn't care about the desktop market, why is the Raptor tuned for non-server performance? Until the latest generation of 15K drives, it was hands-down the best thing you could get for the desktop because it is optimized for non-server use. Its server performance is weak. You're pretty condescending for a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about.

The Raptor is intended for the lowend server market, all the specs and marketing material will confirm that. Obvious to everyone but you. WD doesn't have an enterprise SCSI division to optimize their drives. Also running on what amounts to a PATA interface, cripples the Raptors abilities in multiuser environments vs the much more robust SCSI interface. There is no evidence at all that they optimized the drive for desktop use. When it was released the current generation of SCSI was over a year old. It should have been faster. It was still slower overall than both of Maxtor's and Fujitsu's 15k offerings as well, so stop making stuff up.

The Raptor does not match up to SCSI's prowess in server benchmarks, but that doesn't really matter, as it is designed to be a low cost alternative to SCSI. Again, look at the comparison above, it may be slower than SCSI but it still kills the best 7200 RPM SATA has to offer giving it a unique position in the market which isn't exactly huge.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Well in WD's view point I think they might be thinking Raptor is still very competitive in many areas, which I agree; so they don't really have to upgrade the Raptor. 36GB Raptor was plagued with performace problems thats why a 74GB Raptor replaced it very soon.

Also Raptors are still selling well.

Thirdly, the platter density cannot significantly boost Raptors small platter to a higher capacity much. If they say they are releasing a 90GB Raptor with SATA-II and 16MB, the upgrade still seems worthless.

Lastly, SATA-II and 16MB cache would not help Raptor much in terms of performance. The low seek time reduce the need for a large cache. Doubling the cache may even yield no performance gain. Raptors' transfer rate is still far behind even the ATA-100 bandwidth... so...

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: Ronin
SATA II > Raptors, even with the lower RPM.

Plenty of reviews out there reflecting as such, too. I think the only thing a Raptor has better is a faster seek time.

Why? Doesn't SATA II only provide more bandwidth? Just like ATA133 vs. ATA100 which provide 0% performance advantage.

 

[Pariah]

You're skewing the comparison to suit your own needs Tostada and not towards what WD is trying to accomplish with the Raptor.

You said that 7200RPM is catching up to the Raptor. Which is bogus since WD did not release the Raptor to compete with 7200RPM drives. It's a low cost alternative to SCSI in the lowend enterprise market. In this market it destroys the best that 7200RPM has to offer which is why I posted that comparison. The Raptor is not being caught by any other SATA drive any time soon.

15k SCSI is NOT a lowend product and does not compete for the same market as the Raptor. It is the best available with prices to match. The Raptor's closest competitor is 10k SCSI. It does not compete favorably with SCSI in benchmarks, but is about 25% cheaper before taking into account that a SATA infrastructure is cheaper to build than a SCSI one. Saving $40 on a drive may not sound like much, but if you have to buy 100's or 1000's of drives then the cost savings suddenly become pretty considerable. Do you need the better performance of 10k SCSI, or the lower cost of the Raptor? That's basically what it comes down to.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Pariah
There are 9 billion threads on why WD is the only drive maker making a 10k SATA drive.

You keep saying that. Why? If you think I should've posted this in another thread, where's the thread? If you think this has all been covered 9 billion times recently, where are the threads? You'd rather just complain than actually contribute?

And what bearing does the maotherboard market have on the hard drive market? None that I'm aware of. There never has been a hard drive enthusiast market, and there likely never will be.

You really are that stupid? Seriously? You're not kidding around?

So, people are enthusiasts about overclocking and getting the fastest CPU possible, but they don't care about the speed of their hard drive? Does perhaps the fact that there are currently 670 people logged onto this forum on a Monday afternoon tell you anything? The enthusiast market has a reasonable size, and it's not just people wanting overclocked AMD systems in neon cases.

Learn to read. I never said I couldn't afford the Fujitsu.

Yes you did, you said the $200 version was only 36GB. Well, there is a 72GB version (and a 147GB as well). If money is not the issue as you say, then buy the 72GB version.

I can afford a 15K drive. The fastest 15K drive out there is only $25 more than a Raptor. The only advantage of the Raptor (since I already have plenty SCSI cards) is capacity. The reason I'm not rushing out and buying a Raptor is because it's old and slow compared to SCSI drives. The reason I'm not rushing out and buying a SCSI drive is because the only reasonably priced ones are 36GB. I never said price is no issue. Get it?

Seriously, you're just kidding around here, right? You're not this clueless, are you? You're just trying to be a jerk.

Also running on what amounts to a PATA interface, cripples the Raptors abilities in multiuser environments vs the much more robust SCSI interface. There is no evidence at all that they optimized the drive for desktop use. When it was released the current generation of SCSI was over a year old. It should have been faster. It was still slower overall than both of Maxtor's and Fujitsu's 15k offerings as well, so stop making stuff up.

What am I making up? You're acting as though I said the Raptor was the fastest thing out there when it was released. Where exactly do you get that? It was never a fast server drive, yet you swear it was always intended only for servers. At least it used to dominate the desktop market.

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Everyone's new favorite 16MB cache NCQ enabled SATA II Maxtor Maxline III vs the ancient has been Raptor:

Raptor and Maxline III


Make sure to scroll down to the Server Suite:

SR File Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 226 IO/sec
Maxline 135 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 67%.

SR Web Server DriveMark 2002

Raptor 238 IO/sec
Maxline 137 IO/sec

Raptor wins by 74%.


7200 RPM SATA is catching up to the Raptor? Maybe, but at this rate of gain it will be another 25 years before it equals it. Again, the Raptor is not designed to be an enthusiast product and is still beating the hell out of 7200RPM SATA in the market it is actually intended for.

click the link. the maxline wins ALL the Ziff-Davis WinBench 99, beating the raptor by gigantic margins. This should justify the lacking server perfromance for the average user.

AVS/Express 3.4
raptor: 57.0 MB/sec
maxline: 144.4 MB/sec
what's that like a 125% increase?

the maxline also beats the raptor handidly winning most of the Desktop/Workstation Suite 1.0 tests.

the only thing the raptor excels at is the Server Suite 1.0 test because that's what it was intended for in the first place.

whne it comes down to it, the raptor is lacking for everyday use thatm most of the anand users are going to throw at ti compared to the maxline. unless you host a server, the maxline has already caught up.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: Pariah
You're skewing the comparison to suit your own needs Tostada and not towards what WD is trying to accomplish with the Raptor.

Yeah, you keep saying that the only reason WD made the Raptor was for people who wanted cheaper low-end servers. We'll just pretend that the desktop enthusiast market makes up less than 5% of Raptor sales. It's still a little strange that they haven't updated the Raptor in so long.

The entire premise of all your rambling is ridiculous, though. There is a definite enthusiast market. Many products are aimed at the enthusiast market. It is unreasonable to say that the enthusiast market does not care about hard drives.

 

[Pariah]

mwmorph, did you just quote Winbench numbers in a post about hard drive performance? The same benchmark that says an IBM 180GXP is faster than an Atlas 15k II? Move along sport, you're not needed here.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Yeah it's true that the MaxLine with much higher platter density beats Raptor in terms of transfer speed
Not many people here would go for Maxtor drives I think. Don't ask me why.
Segate's 7200.8 and Hitachi's SATA-II series are under-performing. I'd be interested with the upcoming Western Digital 16MB cache SATA-II drives showing on May

I do think for OS drives Raptors would bring some performance advantage to desktop usage compared to 7200rpm drives solely because of the access time.
For Windows enviornment access time is more important than transfer rate. The nature of paging files and dynamic linked libraries would perform better on a lower access time drive. Windows loading up also requires a lot of random accessing.

It really depends on the usage pattern

Most people who bought Raptor would have a storage drive for doing all the dirty work such as video editing, storing large documents where transfer rate counts.

 

[sparks]

You don't find faster SATA drives because its all about $$$. WD can sit on their laurels because they are on top of the SATA pyramid and see no reason to accelerate development.

WD is the only manufacturer to make a 10K drive because they are the only manufacturer that does not have an Enterprise (read SCSI) division. SCSI is a extremely high margin product, SATA is not. They would never jeopardize that by bringing out a SATA drive that could perform as fast as their SCSI counterpart. It just dosent make business sense.

 

[Tostada]

Originally posted by: AnnihilatorX
Yeah it's true that the MaxLine with much higher platter density beats Raptor in terms of transfer speed
Not many people here would go for Maxtor drives I think. Don't ask me why.
Segate's 7200.8 and Hitachi's SATA-II series are under-performing. I'd be interested with the upcoming Western Digital 16MB cache SATA-II drives showing on May

That's an interesting point. The MaxLine is overall faster than the Barracuda, and both have 5-year warranties. The Maxtors are about $30 more, though. Somehow it'd still be hard for me to get another Maxtor (because their RMA policy has gotten pretty bad, and also my last Maxtor crashed the month the warranty expired). It's a tough decision. I don't think the MaxLine would blow up, but if it did, I'd much rather deal with Seagate for an RMA than Maxtor.

I do think for OS drives Raptors would bring some performance advantage to desktop usage compared to 7200rpm drives solely because of the access time.
For Windows enviornment access time is more important than transfer rate. The nature of paging files and dynamic linked libraries would perform better on a lower access time drive. Windows loading up also requires a lot of random accessing.

It really depends on the usage pattern

Most people who bought Raptor would have a storage drive for doing all the dirty work such as video editing, storing large documents where transfer rate counts.

That's also interesting to think about. Your average enthusiast these days has 1GB or even 2GB of RAM. How often is the hard drive even being used other than for big sequential trasnfers? I don't know what to think, really. Sequential transfer used to be the least important thing for a hard drive, but if you have 2GB of RAM and the OS is doing its job, shouldn't sequential transfer matter a lot?

It'd be very interesting to see some real-world HDD benchmarks between machines with 2GB RAM. I'd think that gaming benchmarks would mostly depend on level loading and sequential transfer.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Maxtor MaxLine has a 5-year warranty? Really? Never knew that.

I never trust Windows' page file management. It doesn't seem to use system resource wisely anyway. Windows never abandones the PF regardless of how much RAM you have. Of course you can disable PF all thogether; but that might be dangerous for running games if you have 1GB not 2GB of RAM.

Another point to point out is the benchmarks of the drives are too fair. What I meant is, the game loading tests, Transfer benches; are all done after defragmentation. Normally not many users defrag their harddisk after installing every game; Programs like BT are good HDD fragmentators. For these kind of normal scenarios; Raptor's access time would be a performance bonus.

Raptor's on my list for my summer upgrade. Of course a 250GB HDD would be used as my storage drive. Partly it's to satisfy my curiosity whether my theory is right or not

 

[Maluno]

Originally posted by: mariok2006
samsung recently announced they are going to release solid state hdd's for laptops. It might take a while for the capacity to grow... dont know if they will migrate to the desktop market just yet. read this article
http://theinquirer.net/?article=23425

This is what I want to see, any idea if the same will be available for pc, and what prices may be like? I know it is too early to know too much, or even if they are that much better to justify their price, but I am curious, as I am sure others are.