Western Digital's Raptor - Part I: The World's Fastest Desktop Drive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2003 7:46 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Test
Now it's time to find out if Western Digital's claims of improved performance on the updated Raptor are valid. Because of the enterprise target for this drive we've split our review into two parts, the first part is a rerun of all of the tests from our Raptor preview with the new drive. The second part will introduce a few more enterprise level tests and will focus entirely on server performance.
Our benchmarking methodology has already been outlined in our Raptor preview; we strongly suggest reading our one page discussion on hard drive benchmarks and how we're going to be doing things here on AnandTech before going any further with this review, it will help you in understanding the benchmarks.
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Windows
XP Professional Test Bed
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Hardware
Configuration
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| CPU |
Intel
Pentium 4 3.06GHz (Hyper-Threading Enabled)
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| Motherboard |
Intel
D850EMV2
Intel 850E Chipset |
| RAM |
2
x 256MB PC1066 Kingston RIMMs
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| Sound |
None
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| Hard Drive (Boot) |
120GB Western Digital Special Edition 8MB Cache HDD Silicon
Image Sil3112ACT144 SATA Controller Card |
| Video Cards (Drivers) |
ATI
Radeon 9700 Pro (128MB) - CATALYST 3.1
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A special thanks to Hypermicro for providing us with a number of the hard drives and controller cards for this review.
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7 Comments
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rhinofishing1 - Monday, November 17, 2003 - link
I have a AOpen AX4SPE-Max Motherboard which has SATA and Raid support. I was thinking about getting 2 of these drives and setting them at Raid 0 for my system drive. I plan on doing a lot of video editing and using a 200GB drive for my A/V content on a regular IDE master channel. Do you see any problems, or have any suggestions with my setup? Thanks in advance...FASE77 - Sunday, November 2, 2003 - link
HiI have a WD800JB and WD1200JB, i'm really glad to see the WD1200JB performing too well in the test, the only thing I don’t like about the drive is that it has no heat sensor! unlike my older Seagate Barracuda drive (ST360021A).
I really hope Western Digital will start embedding heat sensors into their drives soon.
mrHand - Thursday, October 30, 2003 - link
Re: Post on Aug 3, 2003: I have never had a Western Digital drive lose a single bit of my data. Other manufacturers, yes, but not this one.I have a WDC1600JB that walks all over this SATA drive (I bought one and tried it out). Anybody had a different experience? It could be a BIOS setting...
mrHand - Thursday, October 30, 2003 - link
Anonymous User - Monday, August 25, 2003 - link
Please compare Raptor single drive performance with two Raptors in a Raid 0 configuration. Please compare also with two PATA drives in Raid 0 configuration.Is there a problem with excessive heat being generated by these units.
Thanks.
Anonymous User - Sunday, August 3, 2003 - link
But how is the reliablilty going to be, maybe its just me but western digital drives are notorious for being unreliableAnonymous User - Saturday, August 2, 2003 - link
I have a question about write caches: I have read that many SCSI drives do not by default enable their write caches (enterprise may want safety over performance). Are the two 10K SCSI drives in this article run with their write caches enabled to make the comparison more fair? Given the dramatic increase in the SATA drive's performance with write caching, it could be a significant factor.Another comment: WD's drives looks more like the next generation high performance desktop drive, not a low-cost enterprise alternative to SCSI. Perhaps the follow up benchmarks (4 months in the making?) will shed light on this.