Raptors are going though the roof!

[dgk]

I've been aiming to buy two of the 36g raptors but the prices keep
going up. Aren't they supposed to come down as the newer ones are
introduced? Most places are now at least $125. The cheaper places
(~115) are OEM versions and need the power adapter, conveniently $10.
Yikes. Hopefully the PC Fair this coming Sunday will have them for a
bit less. If not, that's what I have to pay.

 

[Ben Pope]

I've been aiming to buy two of the 36g raptors but the prices keep
going up. Aren't they supposed to come down as the newer ones are
introduced?

I paid £102+VAT 4 months ago for my 36Gb Raptor... same drive from the same
place is now £79+VAT.

The cool thing is that the new 74Gb drive is available for pre-order at
£169+VAT.

Ben

 

[Darkfalz]

I've been aiming to buy two of the 36g raptors but the prices keep
going up. Aren't they supposed to come down as the newer ones are
introduced? Most places are now at least $125. The cheaper places
(~115) are OEM versions and need the power adapter, conveniently $10.
Yikes. Hopefully the PC Fair this coming Sunday will have them for a
bit less. If not, that's what I have to pay.

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

 

[Tone-EQ]

I've been aiming to buy two of the 36g raptors but the prices keep

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

10,000RPM Serial ATA drives, very nice indeed!

But I'll stick to my 2 120Gb Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9's, thank you very
much, they're great.
--
Regards,
Tony. (tony.cue(at)tiscali.co.uk)

Discogs: building the definitive database of electronic music...
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Asus A7N8X Deluxe (Revision 1.04, BIOS 1006)
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1Gb (2 x 512) Samsung PC3200 400Mhz DDR RAM Dual Channel
(M368L6423DTM/CC400)

 

[Ben Pope]

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

They're SATA. But they're 10,000RPM and the fastest drive you can buy with
an ATA interface.

They're basically high end SCSI drives with a SATA interface... The reason
IDE/ATA drives are "only" 7200 RPM is basically because if you take a normal
7200 mechanism and speed it up, it'll die. SCSI (read 10,000 and 15,000RPM)
drives are expensive because they are quality.

It's a quick drive... I can write (not read) a 300Mb file in under 7
seconds.

HDTach 2.70 numbers:
Random seek: 9ms
Burst 98.8 (irrelevant)
Transfer (Max / Min / Ave): 60.2 / 36.1 / 50.0MB/s

Ben

 

[Z Man]

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

I just paid around $285 for a 36GB Fujitsu MAS3367 . I consider that a VERY
good deal.

 

[Never anonymous Bud]

36 GB? How long will that last you?

A LONG time, if it's your system drive, and/or in a RAID array!

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

They're 10,000 RPM IDE drives. Nothing faster in an IDE HD.




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[Jens Baumann]

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

They are ideal as system drives. 10.000 rpm, extremely low seek time
(half of a normal drive). My bootup time has been cut in half.

So basically what you would do with such a drive is put it in as your C:
drive and then you plug in a 250GB monster as your data drive.

 

[dgk]

I didn't know they still made drives that small.

36 GB? How long will that last you?

And 125?! US?! You could get a 160 GB Maxtor for that price.

Are these firewire drives or something?

As others have written, they are the fastest things around in IDE. I
do a lot of video and wav file manipulation. Huge files that cause my
drives to churn while I sit there getting pissed. It isn't such a huge
cost when it makes my life easier.

I also plan to run them as Raid-0, which makes them sort of twice as
fast since writes go to one or the other. So two combine to be 70gigs
which is ok by me. But, since a failure by either one effectively
ruins the whole logical disc, the five year warranty makes me feel a
bit safer. Plus, nothing on the drive will be irreplaceable so it will
at worst be inconvenient.

And the system will have an 80 or 120 or whatever additional drive for
temporary offloading of stuff that needs to be parked for a while.

 

[Courseyauto]

I just got the raptor drive,and all i can say is this thing smokes.....
I can visably see a difference in the speed over my Maxtor drives which are
very good drives. Once the boot up gets to boot from the hard drive,it takes
15 seconds for XP home to boot completly. With 2 of these in a raid array on
ICH5R sata raid drive controller it will be extremely fast. DOUG

 

[dgk]

I just got the raptor drive,and all i can say is this thing smokes.....
I can visably see a difference in the speed over my Maxtor drives which are
very good drives. Once the boot up gets to boot from the hard drive,it takes
15 seconds for XP home to boot completly. With 2 of these in a raid array on
ICH5R sata raid drive controller it will be extremely fast. DOUG

Also pretty hot. Lots of case cooling here. One fan blows through the
3 1/2 drive bay. Makes a bit of noise though. I suspect the drive
currently sitting there forces the air around it, increasing the
noise. Two sitting there will likely be worse. I got the panaflo fans
which are supposed to be pretty quiet so I don't know if I can do any
better. The price of progress.

 

[Ben Pope]

Also pretty hot.

Mine is currently at 33°C, my IBM 120GXP (according to MBM5) is at 31°C,
neither drives are being used much at the moment. 36°C rings a bell for the
Raptor under load (which is my system drive - the IBM powers down when I'm
not using it)

The Raptor is quieter then the IBM when not in use, but louder when seeking
I think.

I think the new 74GB Raptors have fluid bearings...

Ben

 

[dgk]

Mine is currently at 33°C, my IBM 120GXP (according to MBM5) is at 31°C,
neither drives are being used much at the moment. 36°C rings a bell for the
Raptor under load (which is my system drive - the IBM powers down when I'm
not using it)

The Raptor is quieter then the IBM when not in use, but louder when seeking
I think.

I think the new 74GB Raptors have fluid bearings...

Ben

Fluid bearings and even more expensive. One new raptor or two old ones
in Raid-0. Tough choice.

 

[Ben Pope]

Fluid bearings and even more expensive. One new raptor or two old ones
in Raid-0. Tough choice.

I think I'd be tempted to go for the new one...

My indirect experience of RAID 0 is that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Would be nice to see some benchmarks though.

Ben

 

[dgk]

I think I'd be tempted to go for the new one...

My indirect experience of RAID 0 is that it's more trouble than it's worth.
Would be nice to see some benchmarks though.

Ben

It doesn't seem like much trouble though. According to the manual you
sort of set it up and forget about it and let the chip handle the
work. I don't even see a price for the new ones yet. Are they
available?

Well, all this hits the fan on Sunday. There's a PC Fair in the area
and I really want to get this working.

 

[Ben Pope]

It doesn't seem like much trouble though. According to the manual you
sort of set it up and forget about it and let the chip handle the
work.

Indeed. A mate of mine had his RAID partition go fubar on more than one
occasion though.

I don't even see a price for the new ones yet. Are they
available?

Not yet... but soon it seems. Pre-order price is about £200 from
tekheads.co.uk

Ben

 

[dgk]

Indeed. A mate of mine had his RAID partition go fubar on more than one
occasion though.


Not yet... but soon it seems. Pre-order price is about £200 from
tekheads.co.uk

Ben

Well it's snowing really hard here in NY. It was supposed to switch
over to rain and then back to snow tomorrow but the latest poop is
that it's not switching over so we could really be in for a bad one.
That might cancel the PC Fair !! oh no. And I was so looking forward
to some deferred immediate gratification.

 

[Big Daddy]

I think I'd be tempted to go for the new one...

My indirect experience of RAID 0 is that it's more trouble than it's
worth. Would be nice to see some benchmarks though.

I've been running an ATA133 RAID 0 setup with (2) 40GB Maxtors through a
Promise RAID controller on my motherboard for 2 years now and it was
noticably faster. Now, since the advent of 8MB cache drives, it doesn't
seem that much faster these days, but if I were to upgrade to 2 drives with
the larger cache, I'm sure it would get a kick in the pants. It wasn't that
difficult to setup and I haven't had a bit of trouble out of it. My brother
is going to setup his new P4P800 Deluxe with SATA RAID with 2 drives with
8MB cache and I'll let you know how fast they are when we test them in
Sandra. My best Sandra benchmark for my RAID was almost 39,000. I expect my
brother's RAID to benchmark in the 50,000's. I know a single drive with 8MB
cache is close to my score, but it won't approach the score I fully expect
him to acheive. Now, I know people claim Sandra isn't the best benchmark
for drive speed, but it's just a yard stick.

 

[Big Daddy]

I've been running an ATA133 RAID 0 setup with (2) 40GB Maxtors through a
Promise RAID controller on my motherboard for 2 years now and it was
noticably faster. Now, since the advent of 8MB cache drives, it doesn't
seem that much faster these days, but if I were to upgrade to 2 drives
with the larger cache, I'm sure it would get a kick in the pants. It
wasn't that difficult to setup and I haven't had a bit of trouble out of
it. My brother is going to setup his new P4P800 Deluxe with SATA RAID with
2 drives with 8MB cache and I'll let you know how fast they are when we
test them in Sandra. My best Sandra benchmark for my RAID was almost
39,000. I expect my brother's RAID to benchmark in the 50,000's. I know a
single drive with 8MB cache is close to my score, but it won't approach
the score I fully expect him to acheive. Now, I know people claim Sandra
isn't the best benchmark for drive speed, but it's just a yard stick.

After doing a complete defrag of my RAID with Diskeeper, I ran Sandra's File
System Benchmark and I hit an all-time high score @ 40901 kB/s. My drives
are Maxtor ATA133 40GB drives with 2MB cache (2 of them). For comparison,
the software lists that a SATA RAID setup with (2) 120GB Maxtor drives with
8MB cache have a score of 54344 kB/s, an ATA100 RAID setup with 2MB cache
40GB DeskStar drives with a score of 36300 kB/s, a single ATA100 8MB cache
Western Digital 120GB drive score of 31400 kB/s, and finally an ATA100 80GB
IBM DeskStar drive with 2MB cache with a score of 29200 kB/s.

Now, everytime you run the benchmark, you get different results. Also, I
have a pretty loaded down system. I don't know how Sandra works, but I'm
willing to bet that if I reboot into Safe Mode and run the software, it'll
produce still better results.

Point is, RAID is very much worth the hassle, to me. As you can see, using a
similar drive alone with the 2MB cache produced less than 3/4's the speed
my RAID produced. I didn't see a listing for a single SATA drive with 8MB
cache, but I'd assume it's pretty much close to the ATA100 drive with the
8MB cache - maybe ever so slightly faster.

For the record, the software lists (4) Raptor drives in a SATA RAID setup @
a mind boggling 99,800 kB/s! A similar setup with only 2 drives produced
61488 kB/s.

 

[Ben Pope]

After doing a complete defrag of my RAID with Diskeeper, I ran Sandra's
File System Benchmark and I hit an all-time high score @ 40901 kB/s. My

Just benching mine now...

25869 with ~5% fragmentation (Raptor on SiI3112A) oh, and NTFS5

Now, everytime you run the benchmark, you get different results. Also, I
have a pretty loaded down system. I don't know how Sandra works, but I'm
willing to bet that if I reboot into Safe Mode and run the software, it'll
produce still better results.

I won't... I think DMA is disabled

Point is, RAID is very much worth the hassle, to me. As you can see,
using a similar drive alone with the 2MB cache produced less than 3/4's
the speed my RAID produced. I didn't see a listing for a single SATA
drive with 8MB cache, but I'd assume it's pretty much close to the ATA100
drive with the 8MB cache - maybe ever so slightly faster.

For the record, the software lists (4) Raptor drives in a SATA RAID setup
@ a mind boggling 99,800 kB/s! A similar setup with only 2 drives produced
61488 kB/s.

I can believe that... I can sustain reads of 50MB/s and writes at 45MB/s

I would expect that to have been tested on the ICH5R.

Ben