Adding another Raptor

[Mark G.]

I am running win xp pro and already have one WD Raptor drive, but am
thinking of getting another one. Not sure if mine is the 8mb or the 16mb,
but I bought it at least a couple of years ago. The current one is 74gb.
Anyhow, in looking to get another 74gb one, I noticed that there were the 2
different versions, one with 8 and 16mb's. So my question is, is there that
much difference that it is worth shelling out an extra $50 for the 16mb
model? The one I currently have has worked fine, and heck, after all, it is
a raptor. I use these drives to run my OS, Photoshop, games, etc... Thoughts
on this please? Thanks much.

 

[Jeff Barnett]

I am running win xp pro and already have one WD Raptor drive, but am
thinking of getting another one. Not sure if mine is the 8mb or the 16mb,
but I bought it at least a couple of years ago. The current one is 74gb.
Anyhow, in looking to get another 74gb one, I noticed that there were the 2
different versions, one with 8 and 16mb's. So my question is, is there that
much difference that it is worth shelling out an extra $50 for the 16mb
model? The one I currently have has worked fine, and heck, after all, it is
a raptor. I use these drives to run my OS, Photoshop, games, etc... Thoughts
on this please? Thanks much.

I believe there is more difference than buffer size: one of the models
is made for home use and implements very thorough error recovery that
takes a long time (minutes?); the other model is made for RAID use
where long timeouts will cause the RAID to consider the disk totally
dead. The latter is proper behavior for some enterprise environments
where the the operator swaps in a new disk and there is automagic
recovery of the RAID. I suggest you go the the Western Digital web site
and read about the disks, then make an informed decisions.


-- Jeff Barnett