150GB Raptor?

PCT - the new Raptor appears to be real, it should work fine in the earlier dual 2.5 (SATA2 is backward compatible with SATA1), many view the SATA 2 designation as a bunch of marketing hype at the moment due to the limits of what today's hard drives can deliver (SATA1 bandwidth is not saturated in 99% of the cases). The 16 MB cache will be of variable value depending on your application. As an example, Photoshop CS2 utilizes memory more so than writing to a high speed "scratch disk" - so the 16 MB cache may not deliver much additional performance if Photoshop CS2 is you main application. OTOH, you will probably notice a difference if you are on an older version of Photoshop.

I will be purchasing the new Raptor to replace our current 74 GB which has the OS and applications on it. We have been IMPRESSED with our Raptor but the OS and applications are starting to fill it up to around 50 GB - that is our limit - performance starts to degrade beyond that area and the risk of directory corruption also increases - at least that is how I understand it.

Shipping dates - ?????????????

The problem I see using a Raptor as a startup drive is economics. Do you really need to start up 10 seconds faster? OS X needs the system drive to hold all the apps, music, photo's etc. It's a waste of 10k rpm to hold 20 gigs of apps and music. Even though there are ways to move your home folder over to another drive, not many people are going to do this. For me, it's just not worth it. Get a large drive with 16MB cache for your main drive and you will hardly tell the difference.

That said, there are reasons to get a Raptor. We use a 36GB Raptor in our quad. It's single purpose...as a Logic scratch disk. There was no need to get a larger drive as projects are no larger than 5GB. It's speed allows us to play more tracks than a slower drive. After the project is completed and mixed, we can burn a copy of the folder onto a DVD and reformat the drive to keep it at it's peak performance.

A 150GB Raptor bumps the size up enough for video use; especially if two are used in RAID (still not large enough for high def, though). This opens the market up substantially as a 74GB drive is not large enough for this type of work.

I'm certainly not a veteran or hard drive pro but to me the new Raptor just seems to be a natural progression from the previous model, with a doubling of capacity and cache and a switch to SATA 2, all of which you're perhaps paying for in the price anyway.

In terms of capacity, it may be that for people who use a Raptor for their startup drive the existing model is sufficient to hold the OS and applications, and for people looking for a drive to hold large volumes of data, other existing drives already on the market still offer more gigabytes per dollar whilst being similar enough in performance.

In terms of performance increase compared to the previous model, it seems to be upto 20% faster, nice but not ground breaking.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html

I just saw these on dealmac :

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=190&Language=en

looks mighty good to me!

Does anyone hear have experience with the 10K drive (I mean the earlier, 74
GB ones)?

Would like to know if they are really noticeably faster - I wonder if they would make my iTunes go faster.

I have a feeling it wouldn't make any difference - although I am contemplating making a 10K drive my primary start-up drive (which would contain the applications) and then using the bigger (7400 RPM) drives for the iT library...

"Does anyone hear have experience with the 10K drive (I mean the earlier, 74
GB ones)?

Would like to know if they are really noticeably faster - I wonder if they would make my iTunes go faster. "

As I said in my earlier post, I use the 36GB version as a Logic project drive. The extra rpm's mean it can play more audio tracks at the same time...say 50 or 60. I wouldn't see it helping your iTunes playback at all.

thank you for your input!

to clarify: I don't need 10K to play iTunes - I only listen to one song at a time.

However, I DO need power to manage the iT library. I am constantly adding to and modifying the library. I am always changing data, improving upon the info in CDDB, adding composers, adding artwork (no quick way to do that) - stuff like that.

everytime I modify one track in the library (total about 100K tracks), it takes forever!

the way around it is to keep working with multiple smaller libraries - in other words, I only work in the big library when I absolutely have to - I keep making and moving between smaller libraries. It's kind of a pain - but if I work in the big library it's painfully slow - to adjust one track, I feel like it's adjusting the whole library, sort of a domino effect.

don't know what the solution is - I also doubt that a 10K will make much difference -

I was thinking of just using a 10K drive for the start up and applications drive, it would be prohibitive to use 10K drives for the whole 500 GB library at this point - would have to RAID four of them together, although I might do that if it would really make a difference.

thanks!

w

So would it make sense to put a Raptor drive in as a 2nd drive to use solely as a photoshop scratch disk? Final Cut Express Scratch disk? How about Virtual Memory? Is there an easy way to tell OS 10 to move its VM to a different drive?

TIA!

Can you say "BLING" ?

BAD NEWS GUYS...

The new Raptor 150 does not play nicely with G5's, therefore, making them utterly useless as a boot drive.

I bought one last week and it just causes the system to freeze up when trying to access huge chunks of data from them. The problem is identical to the Western Digital 400Gb drive with the 16Mb Cache.

Also, the new Raptor destroys the old 74 in terms of EVERYTHING. Speed, acoustics and just plain outright performance is very noticeable. Heat is not an issue at all, I now have the stupid thing installed in an external eSATA enclosure, very sad, very sad for a drive like this to be mocking me inside some other box rather than my G5. I'm now almost willing to go the "Dark Side" (Windows) just so I can use this wicked drive.

Very sad...

And no, the drive I bought is not a lemon. It boots fine off a PCi-X card as well.