Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

VelociRaptor 300GB 10,000 rpm

Digital Skunk

Digital Skunk

macrumors G3
Original poster
Dec 23, 2006
8,108
959
In my imagination
Yeah... might pick this up once available, being as the SAS drives on the Mac Pro require the RAID card, and ALL drive to be SAS....

Any comments from the drive heads? I know the previous model wasn't even as fast as the Seagate 750GB and Hitachi 1TB models, but will this drive improve my performance over the 1TB HItachi much?

If this thread has been posted already, don't reply to it please, just inform the Mods via the little warning icon at the bottom (yes I already did a search)... no one wants to hear you gripe. :rolleyes:
 
Sadly, being a 2.5" drive seated in a 3.5" heatsink, the SATA connectors on the rear of the drive won't line up with those on the Mac Pro once placed in the Mac Pro's hard drive sled.

This fact was lamented a month or two ago here on these forums. Sucks, I know.
 
Interesting positioning of the ports 'cause it's a 2.5" drive.

Would it fit in the 'tray' HDD system of the Mac Pro?

However, SATA cables are readily available and there is a SATA power cable for sale here.
 
yeroen said:
Sadly, being a 2.5" drive seated in a 3.5" heatsink, the SATA connectors on the rear of the drive won't line up with those on the Mac Pro once placed in the Mac Pro's hard drive sled.

This fact was lamented a month or two ago here on these forums. Sucks, I know.
Click to expand...

WHAT!?!?!?! :mad:

I was wondering why the thing looked so damn weird.

Not to mention the sucker would get too hot to hack into a laptop of any kind.
 
StealthRider said:
2.5" drives are used in servers, too - that's what this is designed for. Why they couldn't make a 3.5" version in a larger capacity is beyond me...
Click to expand...

They could. Being 2.5", the platters have lower seek times. Anyway, the Raptor was never meant to be an enterprise drive or used for something like media storage. 150GB is already a huge bump from what it was before.
 
They don't make 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM drives in 3.5" because it is way harder to spin the much larger drive platters and would require even larger, hotter motors (and you still have to keep them from flying apart)

While the seek time may be smaller, the throughput is limited by the smaller track length, and performance drops off dramatically as the drive starts to fill up.

DS: IMO you'd be better off looking at the Western Digital 640 GB drive or the Samsung F1 1 TB drive, both of which have 320 GB platters. These are 7200 RPM but they achieve >100 Mb/s throughput by having superior areal density on the platter. Plus the $/GB is WAY better than the velociraptor.
 
CanadaRAM said:
They don't make 10,000 RPM and 15,000 RPM drives in 3.5" because it is way harder to spin the much larger drive platters and would require even larger, hotter motors (and you still have to keep them from flying apart)

While the seek time may be smaller, the throughput is limited by the smaller track length, and performance drops off dramatically as the drive starts to fill up.

DS: IMO you'd be better off looking at the Western Digital 640 GB drive or the Samsung F1 1 TB drive, both of which have 320 GB platters. These are 7200 RPM but they achieve >100 Mb/s throughput by having superior areal density on the platter. Plus the $/GB is WAY better than the velociraptor.
Click to expand...

Aren't the platters in the 150 Raptor the same physical size as those used in this 2.5 one? I could swear I've seen pictures of the interior and the platters were smaller then that of normal drives.

Why can't they just take the guts of the 300gig and place them in a 3.5 case?
 
CanadaRAM said:
DS: IMO you'd be better off looking at the Western Digital 640 GB drive or the Samsung F1 1 TB drive, both of which have 320 GB platters. These are 7200 RPM but they achieve >100 Mb/s throughput by having superior areal density on the platter. Plus the $/GB is WAY better than the velociraptor.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this man... I was eyeing that Samsung F1 a few hours before I posted this, so it will undoubtedly be my choice now.
 
JesterJJZ said:
Aren't the platters in the 150 Raptor the same physical size as those used in this 2.5 one? I could swear I've seen pictures of the interior and the platters were smaller then that of normal drives.

Why can't they just take the guts of the 300gig and place them in a 3.5 case?
Click to expand...

I don't think that's true, but you might be right, I can't remember either.

However, it's been said they're really meant for servers. Servers wanting 2.5" drives want them for a couple reasons..... one because of the ultra-low access times, and two, because in the space they can fit 2.5" drives in, they can possibly quadruple their number of drives vs. 3.5" (though probably more like double in the case of the raptor given its height).

They want it for its size, too. Not just its capacity. And really only cases like the Mac Pro, as far as I can tell, are affected.... other ones with normal screw-in hard drives are fine; just put them in a 3.5" case and connect as you wish.
 
You know...

For the price of this drive, you could buy TWO Seagate 750s (and have $40 leftover), Partition the outer 150GB of both, use Apple's Software RAID Zero... And get 200MBps of throughput compared to the VelociRapor's 117MBps. And still have over 1TB of storage space leftover from the Seagates.

Just a thought.
 
Tbarr said:
You know...

For the price of this drive, you could buy TWO Seagate 750s (and have $40 leftover), Partition the outer 150GB of both, use Apple's Software RAID Zero... And get 200MBps of throughput compared to the VelociRapor's 117MBps. And still have over 1TB of storage space leftover from the Seagates.

Just a thought.
Click to expand...

Seek times would still be much worse. And for twice the price of two seagate 750s, you could RAID them and get 250 MBps + ;)

I don't think you'd hit above 200 MBps with 2x750s though, they don't really break 100MBps do they?

The point isn't price for the raptors, it's the low price compared to other 2.5" high speed drives, and the low seek times. It outperforms most 15K RPM drives, for less $$$ and more space.
 
OK, you buy another 750, for a total investment of $390, 2.25TB of space, and stripe the outer 200GBs of each. You get 300MB\s RAID speed and much more storage space than the $600 worth of 600GBs of space :D

And yes, I have a 1TB and 750GB 7200.11 Seagate with the outer 80GB striped on both drives. I tested them before I RAIDED them and they both had over 100MB\s speed. I use it as the boot disk, and even with the System and a few other Apps running, xBench says;
Uncached Write 337.68 207.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 352.40 199.39 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 101.18 29.61 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 406.95 204.53 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Just make sure you use the OUTER part of each drive. In Disk Utility, that would be the space at the top of the partition window... things slow down at the Inner (lower) part of the drive :cool:
 
Tbarr said:
...
Just make sure you use the OUTER part of each drive. In Disk Utility, that would be the space at the top of the partition window... things slow down at the Inner (lower) part of the drive :cool:
Click to expand...

Didn't know that , thanks ....*trundles of to repartition drives
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back