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  • DeepThought86 - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link

    Why oh why do you people insist on using new benchmarks all the time? How stupid is it that I can't go to your review of the Seagate 500GB from just last year and be able to compare performance with this new Velociraptor.

  • Zak - Sunday, April 27, 2008 - link

    Hm, so I guess this is not going to fit in a Mac Pro due to non-standard connector position. I bet there will be 3rd party replacements, but will this void the warranty?

    Z,
  • mvrx - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link

    I still find it strange that a drive only has 32MB of cache.. I'd think a gig or two would be on some high end drives..
  • Xean - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link

    Is it suitable for laptops?
  • strikeback03 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link

    As they mentioned, only ones that accept unusually tall 2.5 inch drives.
  • Fricardo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    What happened to the hard drive review article that was supposed to come out a month or so ago? I'd really like to see a full comparison, especially of the new WD and Samsung drives.
  • Deusfaux - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    #1. Tech Report says:

    "Western Digital says it's also working on a single-platter version of the drive, but that's not ready yet."

    Gary can you verify this one way or another? What would the timeframe be?


    #2. I have a couple spike drops when I bench one of my 2 Raptors with HDTach/HDTune. They're not right at the start, but they're there all the same.

    What do they mean? I don't have them on my other Raptor.
  • Araemo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Haven't all raptors(and indeed, most 10k and 15k rpm drives) used 2.5" platters in their large casings? I thought that most/all high-end drive manufacturers used 2.5" platters due to the high angular velocities and vibration.

    In that case - the smaller drive size shouldn't have any negative impact on performance at all.
  • GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    In 2008, for their next generation Raptor, only 16MB Cache?
  • CK804 - Monday, April 28, 2008 - link

    Do people read anymore? The explanation is given on the second page:

    While the hot option on the latest 750GB~1TB drives is a 32MB buffer, WD is once again staying the course with a highly optimized 16MB cache. WD states they did not see any advantages to a 32MB cache on this drive and instead spent their engineering resources on optimizing the cache algorithms.
  • AnnihilatorX - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    I'd think real performance matters more than spec.
    I doubt on a fast spin drive 32MB cache would perform any better than 16MB cache, looking at the burst transfer rate of 110MB/s.
  • rudy - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    What about the fact you pay 300$ for it? For that I would say 32mb should be given if it does not hurt performance.
  • GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    rudy,

    my logic exactly!
  • Razzbut - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    My question is - will it be quicker than 2x decent SATA IIs running in RAID 0?
    Focus here is price per performance of course, and capacity to boot!
  • AaronV - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link

    Exactly! I would also like to see this compared to MTRON's 3000 series of SSDs (the cheapest of which can be found for $369).
  • Hulk - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Once the bugs get worked out of this one it looks like it will be a tremendous performer.

    And I have a feeling WDC knows that IT will be the drive that future SS drives will be compared so this will make it tougher for SS drives to look good in such comparisions. WDC is smart to push this technology now even though at this point SS drives aren't really viable competition. The storm is coming and they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
  • bobsonthegreat - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Surely it's only the real-world stuff that matters isn't it? Is this drive really that big a leap forward because you can load a game level half a second quicker? I'm not being pedantic, I'm just wondering when we'll see real gains in HDD performance. I always thought SSD drives would change the world but they're not really that much faster are they? Not REALLY.
  • Ryan Norton - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    I'm not happy to read that removing the Icepak hoopdyhoo voids your warranty. I use elastic suspension for the HDs in my Lian Li case so 2.5" form factor drives are actually better for me, and I would definitely consider getting one of these to replace my single 74GB Raptor if I could get one of the enterprise versions (or a retail one where I could remove the stupid "heat sink" without voiding a warranty).
  • OldWorlder - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Just take any ordinaray 1TB Drive and store data on disk duplicated redundantly with 180 degree distance. Would result in 500GB with super-fast access. I would only need < 100GB that are really fast, so do it only with the outermost 200GB Area.

    Maybe add bigger write-cache or small flash backup for tags of sectors that are not yet duplicated from the last write.

    Please, manufacturers, please!
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Or you could just partition your current drive and not use the secondary partition... Perf increase is monimal, not huge.
  • OldWorlder - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Yes, that's always a good advice to have a system and work partition that is rather small (with some defrag from time to time) at the beginning of a disk!

    But there's also no need to "not use" the rest, as long as the files there are not accessed too often - mine seems to fill up faster than I can increase it with the next bigger disk while system/work stays constantly at 70G...
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Would WD rush this product to reviewers and OEM's if the firmware was this poor? I mean honestly, you can tell this has the potential to be an outstanding product, but this is a PR nightmare. I'm willing to bet not all review sites are going to re-review once updated firmware comes out, and right now while it does quite well in the simulated benchmarks, it falls on its face during real-world applications.

    It's one thing to rush software out the door and patch later (or even hardware's software drivers), completely another when you do this with firmware.

    I feel bad for the engineers, because I'm sure they were begging for another couple weeks to get the bugs out...
  • imaheadcase - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    It appears to be only a few sites with bad ones, storagereview.com review shows no issue.
  • 7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    How would only a few sites get a particular firmware version and others not? I understand this particular model might have a hardware issue, but its the firmware that I thought was the cause for performance issues.
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    I dont know either, but other sites are not having this issue. check out storagereview.com for a complete review.
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    Rather I should say read any or all of the other reviews...

    Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150
    @ StorageReview
    @ TechReport
    @ HotHardware
    @ PCPer
    @ LegitReviews


    No-one else seems to have any issues, although the incomplete firmware is mentioned.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    And this is why we state several times that we are calling this a preview and will withhold final judgment until we receive a new test drive. Clearly, the drive we were sent has some problems. They may be firmware related, or we may have a drive that has firmware + hardware problems. Maybe the firmware needs tuning to address a certain subset of drives that exhibit the poor performance characteristics we discovered. Whatever the case, we will have a full follow-up review in the near future.
  • retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    cool... I look forward to it.
  • Zefram0911 - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    I know removing the heatsink voids the warranty... but will the SATA and SATA power hookups match a hot swappable 3.5'' bay if the heatsink is removed? I know there would be an inch of extra space or so, but I'd like to keep my hotswap bay.
  • johnsonx - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    While I don't know for sure, I will say NO, at least not without some creative rigging.
  • johnsonx - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link

    While I don't know for sure, I will say NO, at least not without some creative rigging.

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