Anyone have experience with Western Digital's 10,000 RPM drives?

Hello,

Hey, I've got a Dimension 4500, 2.8 Ghz Pentium IV. Anyone have any
experience with Western Digital's Serial ATA 10,000 RPM Raptor drives? I
was considering getting one. At first I considered the 75gig drive but then
I thought my only use for it would be as my system drive, XP would be
installed on it and not much eles. So now I'm reconsidering getting the
smaller 36 gig drive.

I'm looking for other opinions of this drive. Anyone have this drive?
Likes/Dislikes? Recommend any other drives that are faster (Ha, faster than
this 10,000 rpm drive)?

Thoughts? Opinions?

Thanks,

Jeff

 

The 740GD is a very nice drive - much quieter than you'd expect for a 10K
drive (the 360GD as I recall is noisier -- uses ball bearings rather than
fluid bearings). Eventually I will get another one and RAID0 it with the
one I have -- that will be an unbeatably fast combination.


The drives are very heavy -- solidly built, and seem sturdier than most IDE
drives these days (they're built more like enterprise-class SCSI drives).

 

I have a 73G Seagate 15000 RPM SCSI - it is ver fast and has good specs - so
i guess with hardware its a matter of "you get more - if you pay more" I am
happy with the Seagate - but it was expensive, or it seemed so at the time.
HTH

 

You cannot plug a 10,000rpm S-ATA drive into a bog-standard IDE interface,
as the maximum speed they are designed to handle is 7,200. That system does
*NOT* have dedicated S-ATA ports, they are bog-standard IDE and, as such,
don't have the bandwidth for a 10K drive. I can't say whether you'd do any
damage to the drive, or the board, but it certainly wouldn't recognise it.

The Raptor is currently the fastest - and best - S-ATA drive out there, but
it is only to be used in systems with dedicated S-ATA ports. A S-ATA
interface is backwards compatible with IDE, but you cannot make a
bog-standard IDE interface forward compatible with a 10K drive.

You'd be wasting your money, and possibly damage your system - as well as
the drive.

In future, I suggest you post queries like this to alt.comp.hardware, which
can be found on your ISP's server, as this question has nothing whatsoever
to do with Windows XP, other than you'd be installing it on said drive. But
they will tell you much the same as I already have - you cannot install a
10K S-ATA in that system.

 

Umm.......I could if I installed a Serial ATA controller card, right?

Sorry for posting to this group. I only thought that other power users
might be poster here too.

Thanks for the input.

Jeff

 

I've been running a pair of the 36gig Raptors in a RAID0 array for 9 months
now running the system 24/7 without a single problem.
The Raptor RAID is used for the OS (Windows XP Pro)

I have two more Seagate 160gig SATA drives in another RAID0 array for data
storage.

Yes, all you need is a SATA controller card either a RAID controller or a
simple SATA controller.

 

No, as much as I cannot stand cerridwen, she is right about your particular
Dell system. Your 4500 isn't made anymore, and the MOBO would not handle a
controller for that SATAs anyway. Only the newer XPS systems will handle the
10000 RPM SATA HDDs.

The 4600 series on up can handle SATA drives @ 7200RPMs, but the XPS is the
only one to handle the fastest SATAs (10,000 RPM and up).

 

If you stuck a SATA controller card in the PCI slot it would handle it just
fine as I'm told.

Jeff

 

True enough, the drive would work fine. But you'd lose some performance
because the card would have to buffer things up and pass it along the PCI
bus, so in the end you wouldn't be able to justify the expense (I couldn't
at least!).

I would wait; SATA is still young, it isn't meeting up to it's own spec
yet (150 mb transfer rate), and a new spec is comming shortly, more than
doubling the throughput. And faster drives are comming out every day.
Let 'em mature, and use it on your next system. Prices will fall,
performance will rise, as usual.

If you must have a disk performance boost now, I'd get a RAID card and a
pair of cheap PATA drives and set up a raid-0 disk. Get one w/ ATA-133
specs, and use Maxtors that also do ATA-133. Use a reasonable stripe-size,
64K or 128K (smaller stripe sizes do do better on benchmarks, but larger
stripes do better in real-world applications; don't be decieved by
HDTach results).

BTW, Raptors run very HOT, you need a well ventilated case with a front
mounted intake fan blowing across the drives.

 

<end>

Dood,

You need to seriously loosen up. Have a bracer and enjoy life. That reply
was about as snitty and pretentious as I've seen here in a while. The OP has
a Dell system, and that's quite fine as a prerequisite to post his question
about said hard disk.

And I'd sure as hell lend credence to Mr. Neth's response given his
considerable postings in this group (and others).

A nice alternative would've been to *suggest* the OP checkout an alternative
hardware group or execute a google search.

Sheesh.


Stew