150GB Raptor?

Interesting... I bought the drive to replace my 74GB Raptor Boot Drive. I did a clean install of the OS and all applications and have had no problems thus far. Going on about 5-days. Have done some PS batching and simple slideshow compression. And, while I haven't scientifically measure the speed of the drive, it sure seems snappier than it's little brother... and that drive was pretty snappy!

Mike

Mike,

The drive works fine for little stuff...
Try moving some very large files (50Gb or more) to it, and then try moving that amount off of it.

If that works, try a bigger amount of data. Others are seeing problems with 20 or more gigabytes and others are seeing it after 50-100Gb's.

I can move huge amounts onto the drive, it's when I'm retrieving the files that kills it.

Let me know what happens...

Pardon my French, but there's a real ******. Sure enough, I tried a 70 gig folder from an external firewire and the whole system locked up at 10 gigs; tried another 20 gig folder from the 2nd internal and I locked up almost instantly. But here's a kicker... I transfered a file off my RAID 5 tower (D1.8 acts as a server) to my D2.7 with the 150 Raptor via giga-bit ethernet network. Transfered in 4 minutes. I was getting sustained write speeds over 70mb/sec as viewed by the Activity Monitor (I am suprised didn't start a fire!). Open one of the transfered folder containing 1047 RAW files in Adobe Bridge and I had previews almost instantly. So it appears to me that a "local" drive is problematic while grabbing something off the server is OK. Now I use 10/100/1000 ethernet as I am too poor for Fiber optic, but I am wondering if the "slower" throughput of the network doesn't trip the drive up like the local drives do? And, while it is certainly bothersome but I only use the drive as a boot/application drive so at this point it isn't going to kill me. Now if it starts corrupting data I'll be haulng my behind over to WD with a hard drive in one had and an attorney in the other!!!!

Mike

Apparently I can't say pi**er!

I notice on the WD support site that the 2nd position of the jumper reverts the drive back to the 150MB/s limit... I wonder if that would do the trick?

Mike

http://discussions.apple.com/post!reply.jspa?messageID=1628469

I have two 150GB Raptors inside my Quad and don't have any problems tranferring large files.

To test this, first I copied a 61.5GB folder from one Raptor to the other.
Then I copied that same folder from one of the Raptors to an external firewire 800 drive- a 250GB Hitachi.
Then I copied the folder from one of the Raptors to an external 4-drive SCSI RAID0 array.
Then I copied the folder from the firewire 800 drive to one of the Raptors.
Then I copied the folder from the external 4-drive SCSI RAID0 array to one of the internal Raptors..

No problems or delays with any of those operations. The 61.5GB folder had several hundred thousand files in it.

Before installing the system or transferring files to them, I zeroed both Raptors using Disk Utility's 'write zeros' erase option.



G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.4)

FAI,

That doesn't mean anything...
Try over 100Gb and then report back. Some people people are seeing it with bigger file transfers than you and the fact that you have several hundred smaller files within that 61.5Gb is probably the reason why it didn't lock on you.
Try moving a HUGE chunk of video or something similar, where the files are very big...
Mine didn't start getting weird until the second day, I was moving sizeable files back and forth the first night too.

Something is awry here...

Mike,

I tried the different jumper settings also, it didn't help at all. These drives are only SATA I anyways so changing the jumper to SATA I from from SATA II is useless.

I'm also very angry about this and I can't express what I feel on this board, only that I'm deeply disappointed in Apple and Western Digital for not doing their homework. Apple, for not noticing that certain HD's aren't working in their beloved machines, but I have a feeling they aren't aware of this yet. Western Digital, shame on them! Shame on them for not testing their hardware with other hardware especially when they OEM for Apple. What are we the people supposed to do? Stay away from the fastest drives on the planet?

On another note, keep an eye on your stuff because my Raptor actually corrupted some data when I used some repair utilities. Disk Warrior and Drive Genius as well as Disk Utility all had a hand in it to no avail...
My preference window didn't look the same whenever I opened it, two of the icons looked very funky.

Sorry my poor english.

In this week, I tried raptor 150GB x 2 (Striped Raid 0 or double drive HDD ... each case) set in my G5 2.7dual, but failed. each hdd not work on single drive case neither.
Random shut down in file handling. it's same case = Niko's case.
tried all jumper settings, zero erasing, osx 10.3 panther install..
I'm tired.
please fix this, apple. or WD. please.

P.S

the New Raptor 150 working on my CHEAP windows machine perfectly.
is it cheaper PowerMac G5 than old-p4 machine?
sigh

Try over 100Gb and then report back. Some people
people are seeing it with bigger file transfers than
you and the fact that you have several hundred
smaller files within that 61.5Gb is probably the
reason why it didn't lock on you.
Try moving a HUGE chunk of video or something
similar, where the files are very big...

As per your suggestion, I tried the experiment again. Unfortunately, I don't do DV- so I had to settle on 4GB TIFF files. I would have used Photoshop's Large Document Format (.psb), but those files compress tremendously in the Finder.

Anyhow, I made twenty two un-compressed 4GB TIFF files for a total of 88GB and copied them to one of the internal 150GB Raptors from the SCSI RAID0 array, then copied them from the internal 150GB Raptor to the firewire 800 drive- then copied them from the firewire 800 drive back to the internal 150GB Raptor.
No problems encountered with any of these operations. 88GB was as large as I was comfortable with; didn't want to risk filling up the Raptor completely.

Maybe you ran out of drive space in your transfer operations? Possibly you're not leaving enough room for virtual memory. If you don't have a lot of RAM, sometimes these kinds of operations can generate a lot of additional swapfiles. Or perhaps the problem is with a SATA PCI card?

I've been searching the discussions and other Mac forums but can't find any other mention of this particular problem with the 150GB Raptors. Do you have a link for these other folks who are having this problem?

I'm not the original poster, but I've been following this issue.

You need to try this with individual large files -- lots of smaller files totaling a large size won't bring out the problem. Even if you're not into DV, you can try using iMovie to record video for a while from an iSight or other device if you have one. That will create a large file. 🙂

Do you
have a link for these other folks who are having this
problem?

You can find some data on this issue at:

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/

And by checking their forum at http://bbs.xlr8yourmac.com/ -- which is unfortunately down at the moment.

Late 2005 DC G5 2.3 GHz, 4 GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.4)

If you used windows you could have 15K SCSI drives: seek time 3.5 ms, latency 2.0 ms! Years ago Apple offered SCSI drives but with the rise of ipod it seems these details have gone south?

No PC comes with the correct interface to hook up that type of SCSI. My beige g3 was the last Mac with a SCSI interface and it was a basic 5 or 10MB/s connection. The PCI card alone is around $400. If you want that type of speed, you can still go out and get a SCSI card for Mac that has 320MB/s bandwidth per channel. That's what the pro's use when Firewire or SATA/ATA just doesn't have the bandwidth. It's way too expensive for the home user and there's no need for one built in on a Mac.

The german computer magazine c't has just tested some harddrives. The 150GB Raptor was the fastest drive they ever tested, it even smoked all the 15K RPM SCSI drives. In fact, in their Application benchmark (a benchmark that simulates hard drive accesses like those from normal applications) the 15k RPM SCSI drives never performed as good as one might have thought. The reason is, that these drives are optimized for server applications which tend to have different access profiles than workstation/home user apps.

Of course there still might be cases where you need 15k SCSI drives on your Powermac, but the normal user these days doesn't need SCSI at all.

Bye,

Carsten