Western Digital's Raptor - Part I: The World's Fastest Desktop Drive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2003 7:46 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
With write caching enabled and with the production level optimizations present in the drive's firmware, the Raptor is now the fastest desktop drive we've laid our hands on. This is a side effect that Western Digital wasn't really shooting for, but it is a result of the physical characteristics of the drive and Western Digital's extensive experience in producing high-performing desktop drives. Right now, the Raptor is absolutely the only performance-oriented reason to migrate to Serial ATA.
From an enterprise standpoint, we're going to hold off on making any sort of conclusions until we get a better idea of the overall performance of the Raptor in server environments. We're hard at work at translating our other SQL database tests into I/O only traces as well as new web server tests, stay tuned for our continued coverage on the Raptor...
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rhinofishing1 - Monday, November 17, 2003 - link
I have a AOpen AX4SPE-Max Motherboard which has SATA and Raid support. I was thinking about getting 2 of these drives and setting them at Raid 0 for my system drive. I plan on doing a lot of video editing and using a 200GB drive for my A/V content on a regular IDE master channel. Do you see any problems, or have any suggestions with my setup? Thanks in advance...FASE77 - Sunday, November 2, 2003 - link
HiI have a WD800JB and WD1200JB, i'm really glad to see the WD1200JB performing too well in the test, the only thing I don’t like about the drive is that it has no heat sensor! unlike my older Seagate Barracuda drive (ST360021A).
I really hope Western Digital will start embedding heat sensors into their drives soon.
mrHand - Thursday, October 30, 2003 - link
Re: Post on Aug 3, 2003: I have never had a Western Digital drive lose a single bit of my data. Other manufacturers, yes, but not this one.I have a WDC1600JB that walks all over this SATA drive (I bought one and tried it out). Anybody had a different experience? It could be a BIOS setting...
mrHand - Thursday, October 30, 2003 - link
Anonymous User - Monday, August 25, 2003 - link
Please compare Raptor single drive performance with two Raptors in a Raid 0 configuration. Please compare also with two PATA drives in Raid 0 configuration.Is there a problem with excessive heat being generated by these units.
Thanks.
Anonymous User - Sunday, August 3, 2003 - link
But how is the reliablilty going to be, maybe its just me but western digital drives are notorious for being unreliableAnonymous User - Saturday, August 2, 2003 - link
I have a question about write caches: I have read that many SCSI drives do not by default enable their write caches (enterprise may want safety over performance). Are the two 10K SCSI drives in this article run with their write caches enabled to make the comparison more fair? Given the dramatic increase in the SATA drive's performance with write caching, it could be a significant factor.Another comment: WD's drives looks more like the next generation high performance desktop drive, not a low-cost enterprise alternative to SCSI. Perhaps the follow up benchmarks (4 months in the making?) will shed light on this.