Mac Pro and WD Velociraptors

CGB · Apr 15, 2013

I have noticed some people managed to get the velociraptor drives working in their systems.

I know these drives have these "ice pack" heatsinks. They look so out of the ordinary that I thought they will in no way fit inside the mac hard drive slot. Am I right? Do you have to remove the heatsink or something ?

Intell · Apr 15, 2013

Those drives come in a required heatsink that is the same form factor as a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive.

CGB · Apr 15, 2013

Intell said:
Those drives come in a required heatsink that is the same form factor as a standard 3.5" desktop hard drive.

The drive is 2.5'', so the heatsink makes it 3.5'' ? I can just screw the drive into the bracket and go along my way ?

Are all the sizes (600G, 1TB, etc) the same way?

Intell · Apr 15, 2013

Yes. But those drives need the heatsink to work and will overheat if not in them. They also cannot work in laptops because of their power requirements.

CGB · Apr 15, 2013

Intell said:
Yes. But those drives need the heatsink to work and will overheat if not in them. They also cannot work in laptops because of their power requirements.

Great -

Thanks !

Tesselator · Apr 15, 2013

Intell said:
Yes. But those drives need the heatsink to work and will overheat if not in them. They also cannot work in laptops because of their power requirements.

They are also now almost completely obsolete as the 1TB single platter Barracudas perform almost identically and yet don't need any special anything. Actually so do the 2TB and 3TB Barracudas - so that's actually better.

So velociraptor users: Eat your hearts out!

applegeek897 · Apr 15, 2013

I have 4 160GB VelociRaptors in Raid 0 and it is crazy fast, all 4 are in the drive sleds and fit perfectly. I am very happy with these drives, they were not expensive, in fact they very rather cheap for 4 of them and give me about 600GB of storage with better reads and writes then a SATA 3 SSD

derbothaus · Apr 15, 2013

Tesselator said:
They are also now almost completely obsolete as the 1TB single platter Barracudas perform almost identically and yet don't need any special anything. Actually so do the 2TB and 3TB Barracudas - so that's actually better. So velociraptor users: Eat your hearts out!

Except for the random and i/o which matter quite a bit unless all you do is stream sequential. Which no one does.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-20-IOMeter-2006.07.27-Database,2922.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-07-Read-Access-Time-h2benchw-3.16,2898.html

So not entirely obsolete. Raptors destroy these benches for HDD. But obviously SSD is way faster still. But a Barracuda? Please. Nice phat bandwidth only. Boot drive they are not.

Tesselator · Apr 16, 2013

derbothaus said:
Except for the random and i/o which matter quite a bit unless all you do is stream sequential. Which no one does.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-20-IOMeter-2006.07.27-Database,2922.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hdd-charts-2012/-07-Read-Access-Time-h2benchw-3.16,2898.html

So not entirely obsolete. Raptors destroy these benches for HDD. But obviously SSD is way faster still. But a Barracuda? Please. Nice phat bandwidth only. Boot drive they are not.

Agree with the exception that large sequential streaming is all I do on the drives. And most people using the drives for data while keeping the OS and apps on an SSD will also be more-so in this class too.

But you're right, there is a very slight advantage in random I/O with the raptor drives. I wouldn't buy one these days tho. They're gone. Maybe if they come up with a new design in the future but currently the raptor drives and the barracuda drives are just too similar. And with the barracuda drives being bigger and cheaper too the raptors are actually undesirable (for me - and I guess most decreeing users).

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applegeek897 said:
I have 4 160GB VelociRaptors in Raid 0 ... with better reads and writes then a SATA 3 SSD

Only for sequential reads and writes. For random I/O and more especially small file random reads it takes all four bays to get about half the speed as a single $450 SSD or $150 SSHD of approximately the same size.

derbothaus · Apr 16, 2013

I'd buy them if they were only marginally more expensive.

Like $20-50.
$140.00 more for same storage is pretty expensive for that percentage of speed gain but it is a gain nonetheless.

crjackson2134 · Apr 16, 2013

I actually have two of them. They are fast, but I'm leaving them in my older PC system (that I don't use) because they are really power hungry and produce quite a bit of heat during heavy use.

I'm saving my pennies for SSD and a PCI SATA3 card to hold it. Probably gonna get a Sonnet rig.

Tesselator · Apr 16, 2013

derbothaus said:
I'd buy them if they were only marginally more expensive.
Like $20-50.
$140.00 more for same storage is pretty expensive for that percentage of speed gain but it is a gain nonetheless.

I probably wouldn't. Their capacity is too small, they're too hot, and too power hungry. Three years ago, sure but I can't think of a system design today on any scale where they would make choice parts. Maybe if WDC adds 32GB of NAND to them or something then they could once again become desirable for some builds but as they are now... Mmmm...

Or maybe if electricity was cheaper or free and I also had 12 or 14 drive bays open per system...

I just looked them up on Amazon and they're not all that expensive any longer. Just 6 or 8 months ago they were like $350 for the 1TB models but now they're only like $220 and that's in-line with some other normal HDD models so maybe you can go for it.

derbothaus · Apr 16, 2013

Tesselator said:
...so maybe you can go for it.

They would need to be more like $140.00 for 1TB.

Tesselator · Apr 16, 2013

derbothaus said:
They would need to be more like $140.00 for 1TB.

Yeah, I guess I could see that...

phrehdd · Apr 16, 2013

The 1 tb raptors are pretty nice when used in RAID. The real kick with them is they come with a 5 year warranty unlike drives that are nearly as fast overall.

These would be pretty nice drives when WD gets around (if they do) to emulating what Seagate has done with their Momentus line and make a hybrid drive. Price-wise, one could get 2 1tb raptors for less than the price of a large SSD drive and get excellent speed. I consider RAIDed Raptors to be the poor man's smart counterpart to SSD when speed AND VOLUME is required.

Tesselator · Apr 16, 2013

phrehdd said:
The 1 tb raptors are pretty nice when used in RAID. The real kick with them is they come with a 5 year warranty unlike drives that are nearly as fast overall.

These would be pretty nice drives when WD gets around (if they do) to emulating what Seagate has done with their Momentus line and make a hybrid drive. Price-wise, one could get 2 1tb raptors for less than the price of a large SSD drive and get excellent speed. I consider RAIDed Raptors to be the poor man's smart counterpart to SSD when speed AND VOLUME is required.

To me the 5-year is almost worthless. In 5 years I'll be using or at least wanting the one petabyte drives - more than likely - and they'll probably be holographic crystal drives or something. Five years ago (actually late 2007) the very first 1TB drive was introduced. And 5 years before that we were at 40 to 80GB drives. Five before that it was 100MB. Given a similar pace in 5 years from now I just won't care if that slow rotational drive is still under warrantee or not. Three years is fine for me.

BTW, WDC is indeed working on a hybrid drive.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/WD-SSHD-SSD-HDD-Ultrabook,21157.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storag...s_Solid_State_Hybrid_Drive_Slips_to_2014.html

.

thekev · Apr 16, 2013

Tesselator said:
I probably wouldn't. Their capacity is too small, they're too hot, and too power hungry. Three years ago, sure but I can't think of a system design today on any scale where they would make choice parts. Maybe if WDC adds 32GB of NAND to them or something then they could once again become desirable for some builds but as they are now... Mmmm... Or maybe if electricity was cheaper or free and I also had 12 or 14 drive bays open per system...

I just looked them up on Amazon and they're not all that expensive any longer. Just 6 or 8 months ago they were like $350 for the 1TB models but now they're only like $220 and that's in-line with some other normal HDD models so maybe you can go for it.

I used one in a G5 many years ago

.

DPUser · Apr 17, 2013

Yeah, my G5 Quad has one happily chugging away as its boot drive. I have owned four of Raptors, and they have performed well. Pre-SSD, they were the best choice for a number of situations. But my current MP? SSD for almost everything except back up. I do audio, not video, so file size is manageable and SSDs make me happy.

phrehdd · Apr 17, 2013

Tesselator said:
To me the 5-year is almost worthless. In 5 years I'll be using or at least wanting the one petabyte drives - more than likely - and they'll probably be holographic crystal drives or something. Five years ago (actually late 2007) the very first 1TB drive was introduced. And 5 years before that we were at 40 to 80GB drives. Five before that it was 100MB. Given a similar pace in 5 years from now I just won't care if that slow rotational drive is still under warrantee or not. Three years is fine for me.

BTW, WDC is indeed working on a hybrid drive.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/WD-SSHD-SSD-HDD-Ultrabook,21157.html
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storag...s_Solid_State_Hybrid_Drive_Slips_to_2014.html

.

Not to be rude but I'll address your response a bit here -

First - the 5 year warranty as opposed to 3 years allows the drives to be shifted over to other use such as a spare if a better drive comes along before then or the SSD's reach 1 tb or more at a reasonable price.

Second - every notice that statistically, 5 year warranty drives tend to have less failure rates than 3 year warranty drives? This is far more important as we all know its a hit and miss affair with any electro-mechanical platter drives.

Perhaps in 5 years we wont have any drives and all data will be flowing via the air waves and we just grab ours from it as needed (sarcastic).

eawmp1 · Apr 17, 2013

OP - a Velociraptor straight from OWC fit perfectly in my Pro and was my boot drive from 2009 until I went to SSD last year. Nary a hiccup except it was loud.

It you have the funds, however, I'd spend money on a smaller SSD boot drive and use larger platter drives in the other bays.

Tesselator · Apr 17, 2013

phrehdd said:
Not to be rude but I'll address your response a bit here -

No rudeness detected below.

First - the 5 year warranty as opposed to 3 years allows the drives to be shifted over to other use such as a spare if a better drive comes along before then or the SSD's reach 1 tb or more at a reasonable price.

Yeah, I used to think like that. Now I have a box of over 200 drives in my closet ranging from 10MB to about 100GB. None of them ever got shifted and after about 2 or 3 years they were just removed from use in the system completely. Of course revisiting a previous point; if electricity were free and I had a 20 or 30 interface device to hook them all up then I might still have a use for some of them. 1TB drives are now at the same point for me - near to becoming obsolete or useless - in fact I guess they already have as there are no more 1TB drives in any of my systems.

Second - every notice that statistically, 5 year warranty drives tend to have less failure rates than 3 year warranty drives? This is far more important as we all know its a hit and miss affair with any electro-mechanical platter drives.

If you could show a real empirical relationship then sure. I'm not convinced one exists other than in the mind.

Perhaps in 5 years we wont have any drives and all data will be flowing via the air waves and we just grab ours from it as needed (sarcastic).

Hehe, hey don't joke... it seems to be going exactly that way too!

.

nanofrog · Apr 17, 2013

Tesselator said:
If you could show a real empirical relationship then sure. I'm not convinced one exists other than in the mind.

Generate your own statistics from reviews on sites such as newegg, and determine your own conclusions (go through it and toss out reviews such as 5 stars due to newegg service, ... types of things).

There is a correlation, but you have to pay attention to the details. Particularly if it's enterprise vs. consumer and what the platters may be, given how much is actually shared between drives these days. For example, in most cases, mechanicals are identical (servos, heads, spindle motors, and case), but there may be better specc'ed platters and/or additional sensors added to keep the drive in check.

Sadly, the days of improved mounting systems, better bearings and motors are gone for the most part.

About the only way you see this now, is with SAS disks, but this usually means an entirely different disk (one exception will be 7200 RPM models sharing at least some mechanicals, if not all, and strapped to a different controller PCB).

Tesselator · Apr 17, 2013

nanofrog said:
Generate your own statistics from reviews on sites such as newegg, and determine your own conclusions (go through it and toss out reviews such as 5 stars due to newegg service, ... types of things).

There is a correlation, but you have to pay attention to the details. Particularly if it's enterprise vs. consumer and what the platters may be, given how much is actually shared between drives these days. For example, in most cases, mechanicals are identical (servos, heads, spindle motors, and case), but there may be better specc'ed platters and/or additional sensors added to keep the drive in check.

Sadly, the days of improved mounting systems, better bearings and motors are gone for the most part. About the only way you see this now, is with SAS disks, but this usually means an entirely different disk (one exception will be 7200 RPM models sharing at least some mechanicals, if not all, and strapped to a different controller PCB).

Sure, I guess we could deduce a correlation and make that singular point but at a little over four times the price per gig redundancy offers itself up as a better solution anyway.

Of course I mean that buying four 1TB drives of something like the ST1000DM003 for the same price as one VR and using the extra three as shelved replacements (slash backups) will be more advantageous and probably end up lasting two or three times as long as the Raptor.

nanofrog · Apr 17, 2013

Tesselator said:
Sure, I guess we could deduce a correlation and make that singular point but at a little over four times the price per gig redundancy offers itself up as a better solution anyway.

Of course I mean that buying four 1TB drives of something like the ST1000DM003 for the same price as one VR and using the extra three as shelved replacements (slash backups) will be more advantageous and probably end up lasting two or three times as long as the Raptor.

I only approached it from the 3yr vs. 5yr comment regarding reliability, not specifically to a particular drive or even brand.

Tesselator · Apr 17, 2013

nanofrog said:
I only approached it from the 3yr vs. 5yr comment regarding reliability, not specifically to a particular drive or even brand.

True. But since the thread title included "Velociraptor" I thought I'd bring it home.

And I think the ST1000DM003 is the nearest competitor - tho it only has a 2-year warrantee.

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