New WD VELOCIRAPTOR Mac Pro compatible

[Rick Here]

No more messing with removing the screws on the Mac Pro drive cables.

WD ANNOUNCES WD VELOCIRAPTOR SATA HARD DRIVE WITH BACKPLANE COMPATIBILITY FOR SERVERS, DESKTOPS AND WORKSTATIONS
World's Fastest 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch, 300 GB SATA Hard Drive
The new backplane version of the WD VelociRaptor is specifically designed for 3.5-inch drive-based servers, PC and Mac® computer enthusiasts and professional workstations that require the need for a backplane structure.

Build a RAID 0 with these drives, a screamer !

 

[nylon]

Here's the press release:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={A5661238-5766-4CA4-8F74-880755B6CA6A}
Here's the product page:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=495

There is a 150gb and a 300gb version.

 

[Mangaroo]

10,000 rpm is around 40% improvement over the 7200 but at about twice the cost. Apart from use in 2d design/audio/video editing/backups, what other things would benefit from it?

Would I significantly (40%) benefit with the 10,000 rpm drive for following hdds:

1-applications
2-games (windows drive)
3-downloads drive?

(im planning on getting a few hdds for my mac pro, seeing where to spend twice the price, and what not to bother with)

sorry to sort of hijack

 

[Thiol]

Here's the press release:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/company/releases/PressRelease.asp?release={A5661238-5766-4CA4-8F74-880755B6CA6A}
Here's the product page:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=495

There is a 150gb and a 300gb version.

I wonder how the 150 GB version compares to the 300 GB version. Does one platter make it faster because you're not searching two different platters?

 

[O. Frabjous-Dey]

10,000 rpm is around 40% improvement over the 7200 but at about twice the cost. Apart from use in 2d design/audio/video editing/backups, what other things would benefit from it?

Would I significantly (40%) benefit with the 10,000 rpm drive for following hdds:

1-applications
2-games (windows drive)
3-downloads drive?

(im planning on getting a few hdds for my mac pro, seeing where to spend twice the price, and what not to bother with)

sorry to sort of hijack

Everything that loads into memory comes from your drives first. A screamingly fast boot drive means your OS will start up faster, applications will launch quicker, etc. The hard drive is by far the slowest part of the modern computer and is responsible for most of the beachballing you see in OS X while waiting for things to happen.

Here's a good argument from Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood recommends having a small, fast boot drive and a large, slower (7200rpm) secondary drive for your files and projects.

 

[Mangaroo]

Everything that loads into memory comes from your drives first. A screamingly fast boot drive means your OS will start up faster, applications will launch quicker, etc. The hard drive is by far the slowest part of the modern computer and is responsible for most of the beachballing you see in OS X while waiting for things to happen.

Here's a good argument from Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood recommends having a small, fast boot drive and a large, slower (7200rpm) secondary drive for your files and projects.

thanks for the explanation! ill give it a read

Edit: ok ive given it a read and he suggests putting your applications on a different drive (7200).
Is the only problem with that, that you lose the speed gain from launching applications that you would have had if you put them on the same drive (i know the drives are small, but just for argument's sake.) Or do you lose other things too? Im a bit of a dumass but when you load an application, does the whole thing copy to system RAM...?

As in will application processes still benefit from the 10000rpm speed gains if they are on a 7200 rpm (except for load times..i think?)...sorry for the logic mess there

 

[Celeron]

I saw this earlier today. I'll definitely be picking one of these up. I have a Raptor 150 now and its starting to show its age. I'll be grabbing one of these as soon as I see one for sale.

 

[O. Frabjous-Dey]

Hmm, I'm not sure why he's putting apps on the secondary drive. Applications need to be loaded into memory from the disk, just like files, and it seems like you'd save on the initial startup time (when the icon is bouncing in the dock) by keeping them on the boot drive along with the OS.

The drives aren't that small anymore - 300GB is more than enough for your OS, applications, games, and Boot Camp partition. The article is a year old now, and you get more for your money today. I'd keep the applications on the same disk as the OS just for simplicity.

Maybe someone else could shed some light here if I'm missing something?

EDIT: The only thing I can think of is if the OS is doing a lot of reads at the same time as an application is loading, in which case you won't want one hard drive to be reading from two areas at once and reading from two disks in parallel is faster. But I don't think the OS actually does that much reading from disk on its own.

ANOTHER EDIT: Could also be that your page file will presumably be on the main disk.