10,000 RPM Drive for XPS Gen 5

I noticed that one option for the boot hard drive in the XPS Gen 5 is
listed as an "80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (10,000 RPM)". Is the drive
actually the 74 GB Western Digital Raptor? I hope it is, as the
Raptor has an excellent reputation. I don't know anyone other than
WD who makes 10,000 RPM SATA drives, but I thought I'd better ask
before buying.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Curious

 

I don't have the 10,000 RPM Drive, but I do have the XPS Gen 5. My
drive is I believe Western Digital. Its WDC WD 1600JS. I know that
must be Western Digital because my USB external drive is listed as WDC
WD1200JB - USB and purchased from Western Digital.

Assuming WD only makes the 10,000 RPM drive it probably has to be a WD.

Joan

 

It has to be the Raptor; no one else makes 10K SATA drives.

 

Interesting question.
If it were me, I'd open the case, remove the HD and look at it to see for
myself what brand, model, and S/N it happens to be.

As others have mentioned, AFAIK, the only 10k rpm SATA drives on the market
are the WD Raptors which come in either 74gig or 36gig models.

I had even wondered if it might be a marketing ploy based on the different
ways to specify the capacity of a HD (decimal vs binary), but that doesn't
appear to be the case with a Raptor 74gig.

A Raptor 74gig will actually display within WinXP as..

74,340,044,800 bytes, 69.2GB

Perhaps it's a special model made by WD (or someone else) for Dell and is
not available retail.

It would be interesting to hear what the actual label on the drive says.

 

It's not a marketing ploy as such - two very common SCSI drive sizes are
36 and 74G, and the original intent of WD with the Raptor was to replace
SCSI drives in servers and workstations.

 

True, but that's what I was getting at. I was refering to the practice of
the capacity of a HD sometimes being measured by two different methods.

I Thought that perhaps a drive that is stated as a 74GB might somehow
actually contain 80 giga bytes, but that was in the middlw of a brain fart.

Drives today are now usually advertised by the number of millions or
thousand million (giga) bytes that translate into a smaller number if MB or
GB. I'm not describing this very clearly, but you get the idea.

Looking at the properties of the 74GB Raptor in my system, It shows the
numbers shown below.

74,340,044,800 bytes, 69.2GB.

Either way, If Dell is advertising it as a 80GB 10k rpm drive, then it can't
be a standard 74GB Raptor.

I wonder what it really is..

 

I bought the 10K drive for my XPS Gen 3, which I'll assume is the same drive
as offered in the Gen 5. Under properties, the device is listed as "WDC
WD740GD-75FLA1". Not sure if that means it's the Raptor, but hopefully
that'll be helpful to you in finding that out...

 

Yup, that's the Raptor 74G drive, which is really a 69GB drive, so how
the liars (sorry, marketting folks) at Dell call it an 80G drive is
beyond me.

Hmm, maybe if you are sufficiently mathematically challenged, you
could take the 74 "gigabyte-in-base-10" capacity, misread it as
"gigabyte-in-base-2" capacity, or 7.9E10 (decimal) bytes, and then
round up to "80 gigabytes". Yeah, that's the ticket!

I've been really happy with my two Raptor 34G drives in a Raid-0 array
though, so you ought to like it a lot!

 

Oops, I have the 36G drives, sorry about that. What's the reported
size for the {69,74,80}G Raptor?

 

For the 74G raptor, Windows Xp Pro shows...

Capacity 74,340,044,800 bytes 69.2GB

so, if it really is a standard Raptor, Dell is using false advertiseing.

However.... there ARE rare times when various manufacturors make special
items for large oems.

perhaps Dell's 80gig 10k drive is a 'special' Raptor made for Dell??


If it were me, I'd be curious about getting the actual exact model number
and serial numbers off the 80gig drive and look them up on WD's web site.

 

FWIW

Under properties of my 74gig Raptor, it's listed as..

WDC WD740GD-00FLA1

 

I suspect Dell's rationalization is that they install drives of 40, 80, 160
and 250 in their machines. They probably believe that throwing a 74 in the
mix would be confusing.

Wrong, but...

Tom

 

Maybe, but I think that would constitute fraud. It's one thing to
explain HDD capacity in base-10 vs. base-2, but this is something else.

 

Yup, it is, and yes they are. Anyone want to bother to try to call
them on it? I'd say it was silly and frivolous, but they are clearly
lying, and the Apple iPod battery settlement shows that even
withholding important information can cost a company a lot of money.

 

I was told that it was being made by Maxtor. It may be an unannounced
drive.