Just wondering. I saw one at CompUSA today and wanted to know if anybody has experience with one of these.
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10,000 RPM HD. Does it really make a difference?
- Thread starter leekohler
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It all depends on what you're doing. The difference is mindboggeling in Windows as the OS starts up way faster but in OSX the difference is negligible if you're not using pro apps.
I do use pro apps like CS2 and FCP. Will it make a noticeble difference? Not that I can really complain with what I have now, but just for future reference.
I have a Raptor installed as my OS X boot drive and I definitely notice a difference in speed. The seek time of these drives are vastly superior to normal desktop drives and that makes application launching faster etc.
Awesome. That's kind of what I was looking for. Thanks! I'll look into getting one for my G5.
I think that by the time I am pro enough to look for speed in an HD, they will be flash
I hope you're right.
I've got a Dual Xeon with 10,000 RPM drives and although they are very fast, they're also very loud
The key with these drives is to use them for System and Scratch drive space, and keep them relatively empty. Don't use them for primary data storage.
Why? Because they are a smaller platter -- intermediate between a 2.5" laptop drive and a 3.5" 'desktop' drive -- and they have a low capacity, especially against the newer perpendicular recording drives, which pack more bits per track-inch (areal density).
So part of the advantage of the rotational speed is offset by the lack of areal density, and the shorter track length. Because the perimiter of the smaller platter is smaller, fewer track-inches pass under the heads per rotation. And because they are lower capacity drives, they will go to the inside tracks of the platter more quickly than a larger drive. 100 GB on a 150 Gb Raptor is 66% of the way to the innermost track, yet only 20% of the way in on a 500 Gb Barracuda or Deskstar. This is important because inner track performance of any drive, but especially small platter drives, is pitifully slow. Usually only about half of the outer track performance.
So it makes no sense at all to have a Raptor, and then fill it 90% full, because you then have a hot noisy expensive drive that performs like a 5400 RPM model.
So keep all the data on the 500 Gb drives, and make sure your OS swap files and your PS and FCP scatch files occupy the outermost tracks of the Raptor(s).
Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com
Why? Because they are a smaller platter -- intermediate between a 2.5" laptop drive and a 3.5" 'desktop' drive -- and they have a low capacity, especially against the newer perpendicular recording drives, which pack more bits per track-inch (areal density).
So part of the advantage of the rotational speed is offset by the lack of areal density, and the shorter track length. Because the perimiter of the smaller platter is smaller, fewer track-inches pass under the heads per rotation. And because they are lower capacity drives, they will go to the inside tracks of the platter more quickly than a larger drive. 100 GB on a 150 Gb Raptor is 66% of the way to the innermost track, yet only 20% of the way in on a 500 Gb Barracuda or Deskstar. This is important because inner track performance of any drive, but especially small platter drives, is pitifully slow. Usually only about half of the outer track performance.
So it makes no sense at all to have a Raptor, and then fill it 90% full, because you then have a hot noisy expensive drive that performs like a 5400 RPM model.
So keep all the data on the 500 Gb drives, and make sure your OS swap files and your PS and FCP scatch files occupy the outermost tracks of the Raptor(s).
Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com
This report says otherwise about 10,000 RPM drives making any real difference (even in RAID 0!):
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969
I'm not sure exactly how to read the tone of your post, but... let's be clear about what that article says.
The RAID sets always beat single drives. Raptor Raids generally beat all but the very latest (1TB) 7200 drives, singly or as a set. So, yeah, the best advice is to get the Hitachi Deskstar, but if you can't wait/afford/backup that drive, then raptors are the way to go for speed.
Read this review of the 150GB Raptor. It's pretty convincing about the Raptor's performance compared to normal desktop SATA drives.
CanadaRAM's advice is excellent by the way, definitely bear that in mind by using it only as your system drive and keeping it as empty as possible. My 150GB drive has only 27GB on it (OS X plus apps etc) but my own personal experience with the Raptor drives is that they are very very fast drives. Built specifically for speed, hence the tradeoff in noise etc.
CanadaRAM's advice is excellent by the way, definitely bear that in mind by using it only as your system drive and keeping it as empty as possible. My 150GB drive has only 27GB on it (OS X plus apps etc) but my own personal experience with the Raptor drives is that they are very very fast drives. Built specifically for speed, hence the tradeoff in noise etc.
So- is the general consensus that we simply aren't sure if these things are worth getting?
Speaking only for Me, myself & I, I can tell you w/o any reservations that the 3 Raptors I have DO indeed make my system way faster all around, even though they are the older 36 & 74GB ones. I started using them way back when I had a B&W G3, then later moved them to a Sawtooth, and finally into my current Quicksilver.
Although I dont recall the actual numbers, I did test them against the B&W's stock Maxtor, & a Seagate/7200/8mb I bought about a year after I got the Sawtooth. I know 4 sure that I saw dramatically faster boot times, app launches and especially improved performance in Photoshop, which was my main motivation for moving to SATA anyways (I use one as a PS scratch disk & the other as a system drive)
Nowadays, the improvements will NOT be as dramatic, given the increased speeds & capabilities of more recent macs, so YMMV if you are in this situation.........
but for older macs, Raptors & a SIIG SATA card are, IMHO, "da bomb"
I had tossed around the idea of putting a SATA controller into my Digital Audio, but decided it wouldn't be economical.
Someday, I would love to have a 10k drive or two, but for me they are too expensive right now to be worth the increase in performance.
Someday, I would love to have a 10k drive or two, but for me they are too expensive right now to be worth the increase in performance.
This Raptor on OCW is listed at running at 1.5gb/s
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD1500ADFD/
Compared to, say, a 500gig Seagate running a 3.0gb/s, is the raptor still worth it will all the 3.0gb/s drives available?
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD1500ADFD/
Compared to, say, a 500gig Seagate running a 3.0gb/s, is the raptor still worth it will all the 3.0gb/s drives available?
I'm pretty sure the Western Digitals are still faster because lots of gaming enthusiast use them regulary but they will try anything to just performance say a couple more fps.
No hard drives come anywhere close to reaching 3.0gb/s. It's just a standard.
Hard drive is the slowest component and therefore the biggest bottleneck to the overall system performance. Improve the bottleneck and the system performs better than you'd expect.
Anyone ever considered a flash boot drive? just for the OS and some Apps. That thing would scream...
Yep ...
Only the cache operates at those speeds, in those cases the drives with the bigger most efficient cache for your needs will blow the other drives away.
Once you burn through the caches, most of the drives throttle back to similar speeds in MB/sec range.
And the time the drive burne through a 15MB cache at 1.5gb/s or 3.0gb/s is rather small.
However one works better for ego stroking than the other.
I checked the link. It is 1.5Gb/s. Uppercase and lowercase letters are important here: This is 1.5 billion _bits_ per second. However, that number only means how fast the SATA interface can send data to/from the computer, it doesn't mean how fast the harddisk can read data. That number is likely much lower. I don't think the 1.5Gb/s would be limiting the speed of the drive at all.
Is drive space allocated from the innermost -> outward? It seems like you are advocating using the outermost part of the drive for the best performance, but that runs contrary to what I've read at this website.
http://macprojournal.com/partitions.html said:
For my RAID-0, I've partitioned to use the first part of 4x drives.
To digress to the OP, I ended up picking up the Raptor X today. I had just a lingering desire to own one of these drives, so it's going to go into the Mac Pro and act as a scratch disk for whatever programs need it.
If there's anyone that knows, I've got 2 questions about this
1) there's a jumper setting of "OPT1" in the manual, saying that if I place the jumper on on this setting it will ENABLE 150 MB/s data transfer speed. I am assuming this is what I want?
2) is there a way to partition it so that the scratch disk runs on the partition with the fastest response? I know I have heard "inner and outer" platter thrown around when discussing partitions and access times. So what is the trick to this, split the drive in half, and then use the 2nd partition for the scratch disk, since it will be on the outer edge of the platter?
Hopefully someone can answer either of these questions, I'd hate to start a new thread and get reprimanded
If there's anyone that knows, I've got 2 questions about this
1) there's a jumper setting of "OPT1" in the manual, saying that if I place the jumper on on this setting it will ENABLE 150 MB/s data transfer speed. I am assuming this is what I want?
2) is there a way to partition it so that the scratch disk runs on the partition with the fastest response? I know I have heard "inner and outer" platter thrown around when discussing partitions and access times. So what is the trick to this, split the drive in half, and then use the 2nd partition for the scratch disk, since it will be on the outer edge of the platter?
Hopefully someone can answer either of these questions, I'd hate to start a new thread and get reprimanded