New Raptor

[Zap]

Originally posted by: mooseracing
You can get 300GB SAS drive easily for $275 and end up with better performance, WD has to sell these for less.

Problem is the SAS drive doesn't come with a SAS controller. Now, I know SATA drives can be used on SAS controllers. Can it work the other way around?

BTW, I did a price search and cheapest was $279, and mostly eBay (couple etailers). These are all Maxtor drives with 1 year warranty.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Zap
Problem is the SAS drive doesn't come with a SAS controller. Now, I know SATA drives can be used on SAS controllers. Can it work the other way around?

BTW, I did a price search and cheapest was $279, and mostly eBay (couple etailers). These are all Maxtor drives with 1 year warranty.

SAS drives need a SAS controller. Nice thing about a SAS controller is it can drive SATA drives. A SATA controller can NOT drive SAS drives, however.

VR vs. SAS - most SAS drives are optimized for multi user applications and thus tend not to fare as well (given their higher spindle speeds) against high performing desktop drives. The VR will definitely perform better in a desktop environment than a comparable 10k SAS drive. 15K SAS (particularly 2.5" drives) are going to be faster and generally the fastest but their cost per gigabyte is phenomenal. Currently in the 15K SAS market the Fujitsu MBA series has the highest desktop performance. Not sure if the new Seagate 15K.6 can top it though.

 

[Spotswood]

Does anybody have a link to a spec for the mounting holes on these new fangled 2.5" drives?

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: sutahz

Originally posted by: taltamir
On the other hand modern controllers...
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...ge-battle,1394-11.html

Pure synthetic

its a hard drive not a video card. Unlike video card that needs to render different types of unknown imagry, a HDD always just does the same thing, transfer data. I found real world performace in HDD to perfectly match synthetic drives. Get a winXP or vistaSP1, get 4GB of ram, and try to copy a large file to a HDD, you will see the speed PERFECTLY matches the synthetic benchmark. (non SP1 vista will have serious slow down though)

 

[n7]

Anyone found out exact dates these will start hitting shelves?

 

[djplayer]

I hope they come out w/ 74gb or 150gb versions for $1 per GB. Make it cheaper to setup RAID's w/ numerous drives. Especially if you only wanna house your OS on it.

 

[n7]

Games take up too much space these days

It's too easy to fill up my 150 GB one, never mind 74 GB.

But for those not concerned with space, fair enough point

 

[Intelman07]

Originally posted by: n7
Games take up too much space these days

It's too easy to fill up my 150 GB one, never mind 74 GB.

But for those not concerned with space, fair enough point

Damn, how many games do you have? I use a 150 for my OS and a 150 for games and a 750 for user files. My 150 for games has like 80 gig free, after having crysis installed, COD 4, Supreme Commander, UT3, LOTR battle for middle earth, Command and Conquer 3 + Expansion, Team Fortress II.

I can't imagine 150Gigs of games. I could keep old ones installed, like BF2 I guess.

 

[mooseracing]

Originally posted by: Zap

Originally posted by: mooseracing
You can get 300GB SAS drive easily for $275 and end up with better performance, WD has to sell these for less.

Problem is the SAS drive doesn't come with a SAS controller. Now, I know SATA drives can be used on SAS controllers. Can it work the other way around?

BTW, I did a price search and cheapest was $279, and mostly eBay (couple etailers). These are all Maxtor drives with 1 year warranty.

I did my price comparo from PriceWatch. Same Maxtor though for $275 free shipping.

And I've seen SAS controller cards from $50 up depending on teh day also on Pricewatch. Granted you won't be working that SAS to much but it may be plenty in a single drive setup that would be comparable to the WD drive.

For the enthusiast I would rather spend the extra few bucks for SAS (at the current price point of the WD) and have another toy to play with that could possibly be a one time upgrade and beat the WD over time, say maybe a 1-3yrs. I think the market is just to small for that price point.

 

[taltamir]

My current usage (not in HDD sizes but in actually used space)
OS + Programs: 26.0GB
Games (installed and save backups): 88.0
User files: 1.3TB

The OS and programs reside on a 70GB partition from a WD640GB drive. The rest is for games.
And the user files are on a file server using 5x750GB drives.

 

[Aeridyne]

Thats what I am thinking tom, less heat, good mean time of failure, good warranty, and you pay nearly $1 a gig for a good 7200 rpm notebook drive anyway. Granted desktop drives are the best price/performance you are going to get, I totally agree, but everyone is comparing this drive to a 3.5" standard, I want one of these for my Latitude D820 notebook! I am wondering if the thermals would be too much though, does anyone know if these run cool enough to pop into a standard laptop? (I realize i would be losing sata 3 capability) I wonder how much of a hit it takes when going from Sata III to 1.5? Has anyone benched that?

** Well i see now that you cant stuff one of these into a standard laptop, darn. **

At least I guess we can hope for a single platter design for some notebook goodness.