It seems anomalous that the Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drive is sooo much slower in the Doom 3 level load test compared to all the other drives. It sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn't make sense because it had been dominating the other tests...

Reply

Makes me chuckle that a 1.5Gbps drive dominated the 3.0's. Not a surprise at all. ATA133 isnt even maxed out by these drives, let alone a SATA150 connection. Kinda reminds me of AGP... or PCI... or pretty much most of the standards these days getting replaced by "better faster must have!" standards that cost the end user money and offer no real improvement in performance.

Hey, gotta keep selling boards, i guess.

Reply

quote:

---

Kinda reminds me of AGP... or PCI... or pretty much most of the standards these days getting replaced by "better faster must have!" standards that cost the end user money and offer no real improvement in performance.

---

I can understand mentioning AGP, but PCI? You gotta be kidding me... that bus is such a bottleneck. You dont even have to run PCI cards to find out, just stress all the on-board stuff on a feature rich mobo and you'll notice it too.

Reply

Which explains the rush from the mfts to get PCI-Ex cards out the door. :p Really, the only 2 cards that i can see benifiting from the PCI Express bus are high level RAID cards and gigabit ethernet... both of which are being fully integrated into southbridges anyway.

Reply

High level RAID? A single PATA drive has an interface speed identical to that of the PCI bus (133MB/s) these days, all by itself. And then there's SATA with 150MB/s and 300MB/s interface speeds now. Not to mention the PCI bus is usually shared with a multitude of devices, all wanting some bandwidth.

Reply

They are integrated into southbridge and still utilize the PCI bus mostly. PCI bus aint only the slot you see on your mobo, you know..

Reply

You said AGP and PCI, not AGP and PCIe. Obviously there isn't a lot of difference between the latter, but there is quite a bit of difference between the former.

Reply

How would the WD perform in RAID1 when compared vs the other drives in RAID1? You hinted at it possibly being slower when striped, but how big is the difference? Does it maintain the lead over the other two when striped, or is it outperformed?

Reply

From what I read at storage review, the 400gb western digital has the same chipset/technology as the 10k raptor, just with 100gb plattersx4. That is why you see such high I/O scores.

I picked up two 400gb RE's (raid edition) to back up my data in a 400x2 raid 1. I couldnt be more pleased with the price/performance. The 400gb drives boast a 1.2 million hours MTBF, which seems pretty impressive for such an inexpensive drive. The motor looks rather large compared to other units, but i was too chicken to take apart my new drives to inspect.

What really bothers me is that anandtech rounded up the T7k250gb 160gb version which uses different platters than the T7k250 250gb. The 250gb uses 2x125gb platters which greatly improves performance over the 160gb.


For me, I use the T7k250 250gbx2 in a raid0 SATA 3.0gb/sec with the option of adding 2 more for much better performance and space in a raid0

for data, I use 400gbx2 raid 1


the best part is, I have lots of room to grow. I can grow to a 1tb main array and a 800gb data array.

I hope to see anandtech tackle some more hard drives! The 400gb western digital is an absolute STEAL at the price.


Reply

It is fairly uncommon for HD manufacturers to release updated firmware after the fact, but that might be what the other drives need.

Reply