NEW 150Gb Raptors

M1keMK · 6 Jan 2006 at 18:12

Think im gonna grab myself one of these and sell my 2 36gb's to put towards it. It'll be nice not running raid for a while, I dont think there is really that much performance increase from it anyway, and these new 150gb ones look pretty damn fast compared with my 36's in the review that was posted.

Fred_Or_Dead · 6 Jan 2006 at 23:21

adwhitworth said:
The "Raptor-X" (WD1500AHFD) will be out around mid-February and no earlier. It is also going to carry a fairly weighty premium. The internals themselves are exactly the same and as said - the only difference is the window.

And the fact that the totally pointless window cooks the hard drive :eek:

Hence the 50% MTBF compared to the normal one without a plastic window!!

VaderDSL · 6 Jan 2006 at 23:21

Fred_Or_Dead said:
And the fact that the totally pointless window cooks the hard drive Hence the 50% MTBF compared to the normal one without a plastic window!!

Indeed

I am completely :eek:

why they're releasing it

*VaderDSL gets ready to buy up peoples cheap 36gb Raptors off MM

tomos · 6 Jan 2006 at 23:42

heh, me too (74 gigs tho)

lego · 7 Jan 2006 at 02:48

grhh i dont have a raptor at the moment so i have 3 choices

a) 1 x 150 Gig
b) 2 x 74 gig (raid)
c) really go for gold and 2 x 150Gig (even though i will never fill it with useful things eg.games/apps)

I'm heavily swaying towards 2 x 74gig purely to cost/performance ratio

superflyguy · 7 Jan 2006 at 15:59

Let's face facts, it's never going to be as good as expected. Just like £700 on two 7800GTX's in SLi when they came out.....

Ken · 7 Jan 2006 at 17:46

Installing mine now.
Pics and benchmarks to come...

Messiah Khan · 7 Jan 2006 at 19:07

Ken said:
Installing mine now.
Pics and benchmarks to come...

wow, that was fast

sativa · 7 Jan 2006 at 20:43

This will bne interesting

kinggost · 7 Jan 2006 at 20:48

Ive got one on the way on monday but i wont have it in my system for a while it going in my new build

smids · 7 Jan 2006 at 20:48

messiah khan said:
wow, that was fast

If I hadn't have overslept and missed the ruddy postman at 8:00am (who coincidentally came at 8am when he never comes until at least 9:15!) this morning, I would have had mine installed and reviewed by now :mad:

Now I have to wait till Monday

.

uvarvu · 7 Jan 2006 at 23:47

Just ordered my raptor. I'm going to get this instead of raiding up another 74gb raptor because of power issues, I'm running an shuttle SN26P with a SLI configuration.

kleox64 · 8 Jan 2006 at 00:04

Installed mine, damn thier quiet and not what I expeced from a 10K RPM drive.

My year old 200GB seagate 7200.7 makes more noise than this.

AnastieByte · 8 Jan 2006 at 09:54

Cant wait to hear more opinions on this HDD. I will add mine when it arrives this week

Arex · 8 Jan 2006 at 13:02

Well - finished installing two 150GB raptors (RAID 0) yesterday. Tried them on both the Sil 3114 chip and came up with a throughput of 99MB\sec and then after a rebuild against the NForce 4 chipset which ran at a much better 126MB\sec using SiSoft Sandra. Not sure how much I would trust the benchmark against the Sil chip as it was a bit of a dodgy install........

If anyone can think of any other test that would be interesting to run against the disks, feel free to suggest them........

smids · 8 Jan 2006 at 13:06

Arex said:
Well - finished installing two 150GB raptors (RAID 0) yesterday. Tried them on both the Sil 3114 chip and came up with a throughput of 99MB\sec and then after a rebuild against the NForce 4 chipset which ran at a much better 126MB\sec using SiSoft Sandra. Not sure how much I would trust the benchmark against the Sil chip as it was a bit of a dodgy install........

If anyone can think of any other test that would be interesting to run against the disks, feel free to suggest them........

The SiL chip runs off the PCI bus and the nF4 RAID runs off the PCI-E bus. One can easily attribute this to that.

Also, use HDTach, Sisoft Sandra is hopeless when it comes to HD benchmarks...

Arex · 8 Jan 2006 at 14:04

Yes - the PCI vs PCI-E thing would certainly account for the difference.

Tried to HDTach - 1st time I have tried it so not really sure what to make of the results, but look OK against the other benchmarks for disks that are included in HDTach:

maranello168 · 8 Jan 2006 at 14:12

Arex said:
Yes - the PCI vs PCI-E thing would certainly account for the difference.

Tried to HDTach - 1st time I have tried it so not really sure what to make of the results, but look OK against the other benchmarks for disks that are included in HDTach:

Very nice.

Did you have the 74gig version b4? If so how does this it compare to the new one?

smids · 8 Jan 2006 at 14:25

Depends on the stripe size. Here is my 74GB Raptor RAID0 with a 16K Stripe size and 4K cluster:

Arex · 8 Jan 2006 at 14:29

Hi there - yes this time last year I was running x4 74GB raptors and I have owned 36GB raptors before that.

Although I have no benchmarks to back this up I would have to say that most of the time you cannot tell the difference. Only with things like loading a level in Doom 3 or Quake 4 does it seem a *bit* quicker, but if you sat me in front of two computers and asked me to guess which had which raptors in, I don't think I could. Unless I looked in Device Manager or something like that, I suppose....

I have read recently about how some of the early raptors are being surpassed in performance by 7200RPM drives and I am sure they are correct - they have all sorts of benchmarks to back it up, but for me all raptors just feel "quicker" around Windows that 7200RPM drives. If I hadn't flogged those four 74GB drives back in March, I probably wouldn't have bothered buying the 150GB disks.

*NEW* 150Gb Raptors

NEW 150Gb Raptors