New Wd Velociraptors Could Be Coming Soon

[azamataz]

6Gbps raptors could be coming. read here

[R31Nismoid]

I would take anything that comes from Fudzilla with a heavy grain of salt. It's like Woman's Day of the PC world.

I'm honestly not convinced these will be viable even if it's true.

Given the price of a 60GB SSD, you could run the O/S off that and then just jab 4TB (1TB 7200rpm drives) into a RAID array and it wouldn't be far off a WD Velo and you'd have a nice amount of space to go with it all and a O/S that would be faster due to the SSD.

[gfunkk]

i have a raptor and i swear by it, SSD's are too expensive

new ones sound good!

[R31Nismoid]

Given whats been released in the US the past couple of weeks - SSD prices in a couple of months should start getting closer to reasonable.

A 60GB SSD + a raid array of 7200

or

300GB Raptor + whatever

First one will be much more responsive to use

[DivHunter]

Given whats been released in the US the past couple of weeks - SSD prices in a couple of months should start getting closer to reasonable.

A 60GB SSD + a raid array of 7200

or

300GB Raptor + whatever

First one will be much more responsive to use

Only one will lose ~20% of it's perfomance within 6 months.

[R31Nismoid]

Oh now now now... that is wrong and you know it.

A TRIM enabled drive will never degrade.

Even if you dont have a TRIM drive there are ways to clean it up back to 100% working efficency very easily

[25GTT]

So till SSD then all the way?

On Toms hardware a lot of the testing showed not a huge amount of difference between the raptor and the Caviar black FASS 2TB edition. makes ya wonder, put 2x2TBs in raid format and see if there is much of a comparison at all, price would be pretty good and you would score 4TB compared to 600GB

I have always wanted a raptor though :-)

[R31Nismoid]

Of course SSD's are the way - get one with TRIM and you are home free.

Just get a 60/80gb SSD and run the games/OS off that, it'll load faster than the stupid windows sounds play

If you want mass storage + speed in a network style setup where you are sending large files just mash half a dozen 1.5TB drives together in RAID5.

Don't use onboard though for that much, get a proper hardware raid and it'll be stinking fast for 7200rpm drives.

I can't see a market anymore for Raptors anymore now that you can get SSD's.

They are to expensive on a $$/GB range compared to 7200rpm drives.

They are slower when compared to a SSD

They are just the odd man out now IMO.

Money saved from buying a SSD + RAID 7200s would work out cheaper overall than Raptors + Raptors.

And it would be faster still than Raptors + RAID 7200s. You'd have slightly less space with the SSD route but who cares? Space is unimportant.

[bozodos]

if you're going to go to the trouble and expense of an SSD, there's no point putting your games on a conventional SATA drive IMO.

[R31Nismoid]

I never said to put em on a HDD.

The idea is get a 60GB (ideally 120GB), and then the HDD's are storage.

You'll have near instant load times... with the Velo's you'll still have load times etc.

[bozodos]

I dunno, everyone I know with RAID Velociraptors are more than happy, ESPECIALLY given the costs of a decent SSD, bearing in mind that Win7x64 install is around 20gb.

[funkymonkey]

how do you get 6gbps through a 3gbps SATA bus?

[bozodos]

I didn't say that they had the same throughput, but a pair of raptors in a RAID configuration is more than enough for anyone but the most anal benchmark junkie /LAN party bragster.

[funkymonkey]

Not convinced. I have a Raid 5 array of 4xWD 640GB 7200RPM drives (WD6400AAKS with 2x320gb platters, the most efficient 7200rpm drives.) For a grand total of $400. The boot/swapdisk partitions are striped across the inside of the platter, with larger storage areas towards the outside.

The way i see it, each of those have a 3Gbps throughput, which gives me a theoretical max of 12Gbps. Not that I'd ever see it IRL.

This was before SSD's got cheap. Waiting for PCI-E RAM adaptors to become available at normal prices so I can move the swapfiles onto 8GB of RAM.

[bozodos]

Ye I'd go SATA / RAID setup too.

speaking of storage costs, the amount for SAN storage is astronomical in comparison!