74gb Raptor - $168 after $20 mir

[Kaido]

Linkage

Credit to resellerratings.com

Edit: Newegg added a $20 rebate...thanks to tagej for noticing! Offer ends July 31st, 2004, and you can get two (2) rebates per household. Nice cheap RAID system

 

[nugaluga]

I know these are the fastest non scsi drives out there. Does anyone know how having a pair of these in raid compares to having just a single drive?

 

[Double Trouble]

Actually, this is currently $188 with free shipping, and then there's a $20 rebate on the drive as well, so the final price is $168 shipped. Now that's a really good deal on the fastest drive you can get for your desktop. I just ordered one

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: nugaluga
I know these are the fastest non scsi drives out there. Does anyone know how having a pair of these in raid compares to having just a single drive?

Goes faster...but you'd have to have an application to really warrant it or to notice a significant improvement. For web surfing and email, you're just as well off with a 7200rpm drive, but if you do heavy stuff like video editing you'd probably notice a difference.

Of course, if you really wanna get crazy, get some of those 15k rpm Seagates in a raid and fire up the software...whoo hoo!

 

[Kaido]

nugaluga, you may be interested in this article.

"StorageReview has put several WD Raptor RAID arrays to the test against a comparable SCSI solution. You've got to check out the results- they will surprise you!"

$1356 ($339 x 4 Cheetahs) + $379 (AcceleRaid 170) = $1735 (4-drive SCSI RAID Array)

$876 ($219 x 4 Raptors) + $159 (FastTrak TX4200) = $1035 (4-drive SATA RAID Array)

Conclusion: "...WD has delivered a solution that can match a SCSI-based solution's speed and scalability..."

 

[WebDude]

Originally posted by: tagej
Actually, this is currently $188 with free shipping, and then there's a $20 rebate on the drive as well, so the final price is $168 shipped. Now that's a really good deal on the fastest drive you can get for your desktop. I just ordered one

That's really hot with the rebate. Best price before with a rebate was $180, I think, if you bought 2. The current rebate is good for 1 or 2 drives. Very HOT, IMHO.

 

[nugaluga]

thanks for the info i been eyeing these drives for quite some time now...
weakening... must re..sssi...ssssttt

 

[RIGorous1]

It breaks my heart that newegg charges tax for me... If I was out of state then I'd be all over the newegg deals, and to this day have never bought from them.

Then again I've got a fry's near me, so it balances out.

 

[lowenbotten]

Originally posted by: nugaluga
thanks for the info i been eyeing these drives for quite some time now...
weakening... must re..sssi...ssssttt

Why do people keep posting these useless "I must resist" posts? That's gotten old.

 

[imported_nitrus]

wow nice find Kaido this is a hot deal for people who have not yet gotten 74gig raptors, makes me wonder is a new 10k dirve is on the horizon though.

 

[Double Trouble]

It's a rebate specific to purhcasers at newegg, so I wonder if they're about to receive a new batch of something else. Still, this is a hot deal indeed, $168 for the 74GB raptor is hot.

 

[Jaxidian]

Wow, this is pretty damn hot! Great find, Kaido!

 

[CrazyGamer]

Nice find Kaido on the drive and nice find on the rebate Tagej.

 

[Yo2]

Originally posted by: lowenbotten

Originally posted by: nugaluga
thanks for the info i been eyeing these drives for quite some time now...
weakening... must re..sssi...ssssttt

Why do people keep posting these useless "I must resist" posts? That's gotten old.

because it acknowledges and bumps a good deal - for instance

 

[imported_nitrus]

Originally posted by: Yo2

Originally posted by: lowenbotten

Originally posted by: nugaluga
thanks for the info i been eyeing these drives for quite some time now...
weakening... must re..sssi...ssssttt

Why do people keep posting these useless "I must resist" posts? That's gotten old.

because it acknowledges and bumps a good deal - for instance

good insight, you are indeed deserving of the golden member status.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: nitrus
wow nice find Kaido this is a hot deal for people who have not yet gotten 74gig raptors, makes me wonder is a new 10k dirve is on the horizon though.

I'm not sure, but I'd imagine Maxtor's MaXLine III 250gb hard drive is one of the drives that is/will be pushing the price down. Anandtech had a great article on it the other day. It beats (usually only slightly) the Raptor in a LOT of benchmarks, which is surprising because it's only a 7200rpm drive. However, it does have a 16mb cache and something called "NCQ" (read the article for an explanation). So you get Raptor performance with more than three times the storage space.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) must help a lot, because I remember looking at the Toshiba laptop drive that had a 16mb cache and learning that the Hitachi 60gb 2.5" drive beat it and it only had an 8mb cache. The downside (for me, at least) to this technology is that Intel makes it...the Intel ICH6 I/O controller. I don't know if that means that only Intel motherboards with this chipset can take advantage of NCQ or not. At any rate, I would take an Athlon 64 with a 74gb Raptor over an Intel 3.4Ghz P4 EE with a 250gb MaXLine III with NCQ enabled any day. But if the Athlon 64 could use NCQ, that'd be nice too. ^_^

Another feature I like about the MaXLine - Dubbed Intel's Matrix RAID, the new ICH allows for RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays to be created across partitions, and not only across physical disks. For example, using Intel's Matrix RAID, you could take two 120GB disks and make half of the new array a RAID 0 partition and the other half, a RAID 1 partition.

Pretty neat stuff...I'm glad new technology is pushing the current hot stuff down in price.

 

[imported_nitrus]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Originally posted by: nitrus
wow nice find Kaido this is a hot deal for people who have not yet gotten 74gig raptors, makes me wonder is a new 10k dirve is on the horizon though.

I'm not sure, but I'd imagine Maxtor's MaXLine III 250gb hard drive is one of the drives that is/will be pushing the price down. Anandtech had a great article on it the other day. It beats (usually only slightly) the Raptor in a LOT of benchmarks, which is surprising because it's only a 7200rpm drive. However, it does have a 16mb cache and something called "NCQ" (read the article for an explanation). So you get Raptor performance with more than three times the storage space.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) must help a lot, because I remember looking at the Toshiba laptop drive that had a 16mb cache and learning that the Hitachi 60gb 2.5" drive beat it and it only had an 8mb cache. The downside (for me, at least) to this technology is that Intel makes it...the Intel ICH6 I/O controller. I don't know if that means that only Intel motherboards with this chipset can take advantage of NCQ or not. At any rate, I would take an Athlon 64 with a 74gb Raptor over an Intel 3.4Ghz P4 EE with a 250gb MaXLine III with NCQ enabled any day. But if the Athlon 64 could use NCQ, that'd be nice too. ^_^

Another feature I like about the MaXLine - Dubbed Intel's Matrix RAID, the new ICH allows for RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays to be created across partitions, and not only across physical disks. For example, using Intel's Matrix RAID, you could take two 120GB disks and make half of the new array a RAID 0 partition and the other half, a RAID 1 partition.

Pretty neat stuff...I'm glad new technology is pushing the current hot stuff down in price.

Most likely the "new pricing" is not because of the Maxline's performance because it is not currently a shipping product.

NCQ is a subset feature of the new SATA II standard, therfore is not Intel exclusive.

With WD "dumping" inventories, it may be due to :
1) wanting to increase revenue for stockholders.
2) decreased production costs and is passing on the savings.
3) increase marketshare in the enterprise/gaming market.
4) lower inventories before shipping Native SATA raptors with NCQ.

I hope its the last one.

 

[daveybrat]

I just got my new 74GB Raptor installed today, and simply ghosted my 80GB 8MB cache drive onto this one.......and not to try to convince any of you to buy one (hehe) but can i just tell you that i'm more than impressed??

this is one freakin fast drive, it made my other drive seem slow, and an 80Gb 8mb cache isn't all that slow

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: nitrus
Most likely the "new pricing" is not because of the Maxline's performance because it is not currently a shipping product.

NCQ is a subset feature of the new SATA II standard, therfore is not Intel exclusive.

With WD "dumping" inventories, it may be due to :
1) wanting to increase revenue for stockholders.
2) decreased production costs and is passing on the savings.
3) increase marketshare in the enterprise/gaming market.
4) lower inventories before shipping Native SATA raptors with NCQ.

I hope its the last one.

Wow is that ever good news...I was hoping it wasn't an Intel-specific technology. And holy cow, SATA II?? I don't even have a regular SATA yet! lol.

Will native SATA raptors be faster that the current raptors? And does it have to have NCQ to be native?

 

[imported_nitrus]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Wow is that ever good news...I was hoping it wasn't an Intel-specific technology. And holy cow, SATA II?? I don't even have a regular SATA yet! lol.

Will native SATA raptors be faster that the current raptors? And does it have to have NCQ to be native?

Native SATA seems to bee on par with bridged solutions, though NCQ would destroy that parity. NCQ is a not requirement, seagate 7200.7 are native w/o NCQ, but next gen 7200.8 will have it.

I cant wait for for the 300MB /sec connections. i know that current hard drives are not even close to that bandwidth but im putting aside $50 a paycheck to snatch up one of these with a SATA II connection.

Solid state drives

 

[Farm]

Now is $163 after rebate.
Not Bad.