The fastest SATA hard drive ever!

[madmatt]

Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor.
10,000 RPM, 3Gbps SATA, 16MB cache.
Available for $300.00 in May.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/21/western-digital-launches-worlds-fastest-sata-disk-the-300gb/
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever

 

[kcnychief]

Loved reading about this earlier. The cool thing is that it seems to really kick ass in Raid 0, which from what I recall the 150GB/74GB versions made less than a 1% performance increase.

 

[Sazar]

I am so underwhelmed, I am almost bored.

🙂

 

[Dark Atheist]

tdinc pinched this for front page!!! 😛

 

[Sazar]

Poor matt, people always stealing his cookies.

 

[Dark Atheist]

well he needs proper protection on them - glass jar with a lid on it and a sign saying Matts cookies DO NOT EAT - just wont cut it 😛

 

[tdinc]

never paid attention to matt's post,

cookies given to matt. 🙂

 

[Steevo]

Pinch off this crap and get a SAS drive like a real man.

 

[ElementalDragon]

*waits for countless quantites of sheep herding towards a $300 300GB drive*

seriously.... i'd rather have space than speed. don't remember hard drive performance making a drastic improvement in gaming or anything like that..... except for maybe in RAID. Even so...... if you pay $600 to have a 600GB RAID array, just so you can gain a few frames while gaming.... you're an idiot. why not just spend ~$450 and get a 2TB array.

 

[Steevo]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822116059

Exactly.

Moar bettar for almost the same. Seagate has 450Gb available for less than $700. To in RAID 0 = 1.4TB and huge performance

 

[Steevo]

http://www.serversdirect.com/product.asp?pf_id=HD1336

 

[X-Istence]

The real feat is the fact that they were able to fit it into a 2.5" form factor rather than the standard 3.5", this means that fast storage for notebooks is not too far into the future, now if they could only find a way to shrink that huge heatsink on it 😛

These days a Seagate running at 7200 RPM with 32 MB of cache and 750 GB of space is plenty fast for most things that people do. You will long hit the bottle neck of whatever application/computer you are using/have. And in the server world this is not exciting what so ever, SAS is just as fast, and has been there for a while now.

 

[madmatt]

Great guys, way to piss on my parade. Thanks!

And no, I didn't order one.

 

[Dark Atheist]

*gives matt a cookie*

 

[kcnychief]

Are they taking pre-orders yet?

 

[rotjong]

That WD drive does look very nice but for the price... no thanks. I'd also like if the cache was larger.

I'd rather go with 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3750330AS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive even though they aren't as fast.

129.99 USD a piece giving you a total of 1.5 TB for less money and they have a nice 32 MB cache.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822148298

Regardless, I was interested when I heard about that WD drive.

 

[ElementalDragon]

i'd honestly avoid the Barracuda 11 series. they seem to be having a bad reputation so far. Hell, i had one of them (think it was the 500GB version).... and it died in JUST over a month. i mean literally went from working one night, to nowhere remotely close to even being able to be connected to a working computer the next afternoon. Thankfully Newegg took the RMA anyway. Now i'm sitting happily with a Western Digital 640GB drive.

 

[rotjong]

i'd honestly avoid the Barracuda 11 series. they seem to be having a bad reputation so far. Hell, i had one of them (think it was the 500GB version).... and it died in JUST over a month. i mean literally went from working one night, to nowhere remotely close to even being able to be connected to a working computer the next afternoon. Thankfully Newegg took the RMA anyway. Now i'm sitting happily with a Western Digital 640GB drive.

I have been a WD fan for years and I have always swore by them but with the larger and larger drives I'm annoyed that they haven't increased their cache size. I can't believe they would release this new drive at 10,000 RPM and not increase the cache yet they did.

Thanks for the information on the Seagate drives, though. From numerous friends I had been told they are fast and work well while also having a decent warranty. I'd love to go with WD drives but I really want a 32 MB cache. For my new system I still have some decisions to make and I haven't purchased hard drives yet so I can still change my mind on that one. 🙂

 

[ElementalDragon]

honestly i don't think there's really that much to gain, if anything, with a 32MB cache over a 16MB cache. the 640GB drives also use only two platters.... and do quite well with access times and such. reviews of the drive on Newegg are quite good.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...g=-1&PurchaseMark=&VideoOnlyMark=False&Page=5

 

[X-Istence]

There is much of a gain with 32 MB over 16 MB. Especially with newer file systems that take advantage of the bigger cache (ZFS for example). It means more data can quickly be written "to" disk and then read back, which is awesome for metadata on what blocks have not yet been written, since it changes so often most of the time the data is just stuck in cache.

There are other speed improvements with OS's and file systems that properly take advantage of the extra cache.