Delivery extra ($5 Perth, $12 WA Wide, $19 Aust Wide). 300Gb WD VelociRaptor for just $199. Only limited to stock on hand (very limited).
This is an ultra-fast 10,000rpm hard drive for those who are not yet ready for SSD, but wants a huge performance boost for their PC.
just to clarify these aren't SSD, these are faster than the usual HDD, but slower than SSD
(just for people who don't know about these)
How do these compare to SAMSUNG F3 1tB?
Samsung Spinpoint F3
5193
Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150
6162
Really not too favourably for the money if I've got my model numbers right. The F3 brought more performance than a standard 7200 drive with at least some/partial benefits of a 5400 drive.
Source: http://bit.ly/dxH2T2 (but do note this is only a single benchmark and different drives are good at different things)
F3 has no chance. They are simply not in the same class.
Surely people would just be better off with an SSD?
Limited space on a SSD.
I barely have anything and I've hit 220GB already. The games that are coming out these days are HUGE!!!
If on a limited budget an F3 and a smaller SSD with SSD caching might provide better performance at this price point. (Z68 only) http://bit.ly/f4pQTL 10k drives will likely be quite noisy.
Rather go separate SSD and HDD, but that's just me.
The caching is still limited to the size of the HDD and the point here is to get my games and OS loaded quickly unless I've misinterpretted how SSD caching really works.
But say for example you have $200 to spend on it, you'd (probably) be better off getting an F3 (or equivalent) and a 40GB or 60GB (80GB if you find a good deal I guess) SSD, since with this sort of money, you're not going to be able to buy a suitably big SSD. http://staticice.com.au/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=120gb+ssd&spos=…
However, I do agree that if you can afford it, a standalone SSD will provide more performance.
Pros:
*Better Performance than usual 7200RPM HDD
Cons:
*It's louder than all 8 of my fans.
*It's performance can't really compare to that off a SSD and the SSD is silent since there is no moving parts.
*Could probably see similar performance from new 1TB SATA 3 HDD's
You can pickup a 90GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD for same price at CPL
But if you don't mind the sound I would recommend one of these because they are reliable.
heh, mine developed problems after about a year and a bit of use.
My 150GB velociraptor also developed problems.
I've gotten the 300GB one replaced under warranty, but haven't bothered with the 150GB one. I've had so many WD failures recently that I've started avoiding WD drives.
Better off with a SSD.
I can't justify getting a VelociRaptor, since SSDs (Especially SandForce series drives) are superior in most categories.
SSD vs VelociRaptor
* SSDs are quieter.
* SSDs are blazing fast and have quick Random Access times since it has no moving parts.
* SSDs also have less chance of failing since it has no moving parts.
* VelociRaptor has more space.
The only conceivable reason to buy one of these is if you already have a bunch in RAID.
If you need the space, just buy a small SSD for the OS and buy a 2TB for other stuff.
You forgot to mention that a SSD has less life (total read/writes) than a hard drive, correct?
Perhaps, but good SSDs come with a 3 year warranty. So you'd expect them to last at least 3 years, at which point they'd be obsolete anyway. The real cost of hard-disk failure is the time and energy it takes to recover from backups (and the stress caused by the realisation that you've forgotten to do any backups in the last month.) My understanding is that when SSDs run out of write-cycles you can still read from them, so the typical failure is nowhere near as catastrophic as a mechanical failure on a traditional HDD.
SSD's are designed to fail in a read-only state, so when it reaches the end of it's operating life you shouldn't lose any data.
"SSDs also have less chance of failing since it has no moving parts."
Sandforce controllers have abysmal failure rates. 25%-50% numbers were being bandied around based on newegg reviews (keep in mind, this was EARLY in the product life, it's probably worse now that more drives have had time to die). The nand is ok, its the controller thats been causing trouble.
I have a sandforce myself. I bought it for my laptop knowing it may have issues, mostly because I dont store much of importance on the laptop and the warranty I got was three years anyway.
Also, I'm finding (and starting to see anecdotes on the net that suggest other people are finding the same) that ssd's do not tolerate hard-shutdowns (ie: from a bad system crash) well at all. I've had data corruption that required a reinstall once, and another time it's managed to knock out a pile of system drivers (which unfortunately windows is being picky about letting me fix). Data corruption occurs a lot with SSDs, it's luck whether it hits anything important or not. I cant see why mechanical drives wouldnt be the same, but I had much better luck with them for some reason.
IIRC the new intel drives are going to have a capacitor to flush out their writes properly. That'll be a big step forward. They are also allegedly improving the write failure rate by a large factor… all in all those should be great drives to get (not the fastest though).
25-50%? Maybe 25-50% of people who complain. The other vast majority who have no problems with their SSDs don't post. Can you imagine a product that actually has a 25-50% failure rate? Do you think it wouldn't be widely reported?
"Data corruption happens a lot" - once again, I find this statement completely untrue. It might have happened a lot to a particular early batch or certain range of SSDs, but it does not happen "a lot" across the board.
You've had better luck with mechanical drives, I've had horrible luck with mechanical drives. I've seen SO many die lately that it's worrying. I've never seen a single failure or corruption in any of the bunch of Intel and Mtron SSDs I've deployed. One OCZ drive had problems, but that's still ahead of the mechanical drives I've dealt with lately.
With laptops, SSDs are far more reliable than mechanical disks, as laptops are more prone to bumps, knocks, and drops while the drives are spinning. Active hard disk protection cannot protect against knocks or bumps.
For $199 you can buy a fair few Samsung F3's and put them in RAID for even better performance and lower noise… and get 1 TB of data to boot.
Agreed. I don't see why anyone would choose one of these over a RAID.
A simple mirror of two standard drives will give more space, faster, cheaper, and far more reliable. Won't it?
a RAID array won't improve access time.. imagine what happens when your disk inevitably gets fragmented.
Sure it will. RAID1 reduces rotational latency by giving a choice of 2 copies. You choose the one that happends to be closest to the head.
imagine what happens when your disk inevitably gets fragmented.
You need a more modern filesystem if the application is of any importance.
OK, perhaps "it won't improve access time appreciably" would be more accurate. Or consistently.
You need a more modern filesystem if the >application is of any importance.
That doesn't change the fact that 2 7200rpm drives in raid1 generally has higher latency than 1 10krpm drive.
Raid improves sequential read/writes. That is, big files stored in a continuous chunk on your disk (not big files fragmented into a zillion pieces).
The reason ssd's are so fast is because of random reads (and random writes, but not as much). Ie: zooming all around your storage to read many small files or small pieces of a file.
This is largely helped by the ridiculously low access time to find the data on an SSD. Hard drives are slow because they have to physically move to get to the data.
You read a lot of small (say 4kb) sized data off your disk just from your OS. Without hunting down a number, you are probably looking at 3-5mb/s of 4kb reads with this WD.
A good SSD could push 30-50mb/s.
Ballpark numbers, but they aren't too far out.
check out the random write figures for the Vertex 3 … nice. The Velociraptor is in the graph too.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vertex-3-pro-ssd-sandfor…
can someone please explain to me:
as i understand it, this is not a hybrid drive, it is a regular (3.5 inch?) HDD, but instead of 7200RPM it is 10,000…
so the spin speed is faster, and I am guessing that the spin speed is the limiting factor when it comes to the overall speed of HDDs?
overall, is it faster than a hybrid drive?
because otherwise, it seems like an awful amount extra to pay for an extra 2800RPM
The Velociraptor is basically a very fast 2.5 inch enterprise (high end) drive.
They just encase it inside an aluminium brick which acts as a heatsink and at the same time making it into a 3.5" drive.
It is not comparable to an SSD, but it is faster than a normal HDD. These kinds of drives were popular before SSD's were around.
You can't really compare it with Hybrid HDD's because those kinds of drives rely on software to learn what sort of data to cache on the SSD part, before its benefits are seen. The SSD partition of such drives are usually quite small, something like 4GB.
I have one of these… but i got it before SSDs were cost-effective. My plan is to get a 60gb vertex 2 and go:
Vertex 2: Windows+essential software
VelociRaptor: Games
Multiple 1/2tb drives: Storage
Sound decent. You could play minesweeper like nobody's business.
Why don't you go RAID 0 instead and kick ass? :P
I have one 60 gig is plenty for my os and a programs. It is cost effective that way
A Momentus XT is better value for the average consumer.
The Raptor doesn't really have a good niche any more, it being attacked on one side by hybrid drives and full SSD on the other.
I can imagine some people still want them, but they're really nothing special any more.
The Momentus XT is a gimmick. I'd take a Raptor over a hybrid anyday. But for now an SSD and Sammy F3 does me good…
XT = varies from "none" to "appreciable" difference, depending on who you talk to.
There's going to be a new generation of XT's though, and I believe they are jumping the SSD size up beyond the current measly 4gb. 4gb is probably holding them back.
Except for a laptop though, they are a bit niche. For a desktop, definately use your combination of an ssd as well as a hdd.
Plus one for the Perthies!
I just had to buy a 180gb OCZ SSD from Over east! Upset no one here stocks them!