Opinion on WD Raptor 150GB 10K RPM

I'm also considering it, but leaning to not doing so
because the Raptor is very loud.

The very first Raptors were loud yes, but now they all use fluid bearings and are very quiet.

To prepare for Mac OS X 10.5's "Time Machine", one should get two 150GB Raptors so one will be a clone.

I see you have striped 2 raptors as a boot drive... any problems..?
Wicked fast?

You suggest making a clone as opposed to striping them?

12 PB Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Silent PC has a good review to help understand idle and seek noise of the current and older model. Of course, for a 10K drive to be this quiet is a feat! But, it is 2 dBA louder than the WD740GD during seeks, and 1 dBA at idle (at one mete), but I found this bit about subjective hearing of interest:

The vibration level was about average for a 3.5" drive, although the resulting noise was a little more audible thanks to the higher frequency of the vibration. Unlike 7,200 RPM drives, which cause resonance at ~120 Hz, the Raptor's 10,000 RPM spindle speed produced a hum at ~167 Hz. Thanks to the quirks of the human ear, a 167 Hz tone is more easily heard than a 120 Hz tone, so the Raptor was effectively louder than a slower drive with a similar level of vibration.

You are going to have to stripe a set, just to know for yourself and see if you want to. And even when I use a stripped boot drive (which is easy to restore from backups) I would still keep your home folder and media files on another drive - if you can - not everyone likes to mess, no matter how easy or safe- with NetInfo Manager setting for home directory path. Or using a symbolic link to /Users.

I think a clone is a great idea, but a waste of a $255+ drive that could just as easily be a sparseimage or partition elsewhere. Or a scratch drive.



G4 MDD UL3D 4 x Atlas 10K/15K SoftAID 3 Mac OS X (10.4.7) iMac 20" Core Duo

Boy, talk about getting a headache figuring this out. Would this work for optimum performance?
Drive 1= OS only
Drive 2= Applications only
Drive 3= working-saved files/ scratch disk, etc..
Don't really don't need supersonic speed but figured this should do it. As long as back up my third disk, recovery from a crash on any disk would be easy.

LOL! I've dithered over exactly the same thing. The configuration of your drives can impact on your performance greatly. The thing is, it really depends on what you're trying to achieve by your configuration and how much you've got to spend.

To briefly comment on your sugestion, having your boot and applications separate is really not necessary and a bit of a wate and potentially a lot of hassle. I'd combine these into the one drive.

My choice to give me maximum performance and maximum reliability is to buy 4 same drives (I've ordered 4 x Maxtor MaxLine III 300GB drives) and to then put them into a RAID 10 implementation. This is to have them in two pair of mirrored drives. Then, with the resulting two drives I will stripe them together to form one 600GB drive.

By doing this I effectively get quadruple read speed (great for the OS and applications) and double write speeds (great for data and scratch files). And as a bonus I get drive redundancy where if I get a completely failed drive I can keep going.

People have tried to keep /Applications on a separate drive, but it is more trouble, and, you might want to do it only for those 3rd party that can be drag and drop installed anywhere. And for that, I do keep my stuff in my home directory in their own folder.

I could see booting from a Raptor RAID (stripped) for some heavy PS type users, and using a symbolic link for "/Users" and put that on another drive.

I would keep all backups off line, FW800 or something.

A a nice 500 or 750GB media drive.

Drive 1 = Raptor
Drive 2 = Users
Drive 3 & 4 = RAID for media projects

Some users have 30-40GB in applications and I can see wanting to off load some of that elsewhere. At least not on your "small" fast Raptor.

OK...
I understand it won't be twice as fast.
I guess my question is...
if I stripe 2 Raptors in DU.. and install OSX on
it... then my OS is split across the 2 Raptors?

Barefeats has a article testing the speed of several drives. He shows the following data:

SINGLE INTERNAL DRIVE
Seagate = 73MB/s READ, 45MB/s WRITE (!!)
Hitachi = 46MB/s READ (!!), 62MB/s WRITE
Maxtor = 66MB/s READ, 66MB/s WRITE
Caviar = 68MB/s READ, 67MB/s WRITE
Raptor = 82MB/s READ, 83MB/s WRITE

It seems to me that from this data I will not use a Seagate 7200.10 or a Hitachi as a single drive inside a Mac Pro. That leaves the WD drives and the Maxtor 7V300F0 for consideration. It seems to me that a $220 Raptor WD1500 is just too much money for a 150GB drive even though it is the fastest. For half that price the Maxtor 7V300F0 provides twice the space and still very good performance.

Barefeats plans to use a dual RAID Raptor for booting but to me that is an expensive $500 300GB boot drive that will perform faster but is it really worth the cost?

If you are copying data to your drives all day them a RAID will be great. But if you work like most users copying data is probably less than 5% of the day. I like RAID for multimedia projects where write speed is important but I think that a single boot drive provides more reliability.

Good info... thanks.

I already got 2 Raptors coming... they were on Newegg with a rebate thru last Sunday.. after rebate they were 200 clams each. Not horrible...
I also got a 320 gig Seagate for 90 clams..
So thats 620 gigs for 5 bills.
Cheap... no.. but I'm splurging a little here.
Add in the 250 from Apple and I'm just at under a terabyte.
The 320 and 250 will be for back ups and storage and such.
The Raptors will be for the OS and apps. Striping them would be fastest, and that's what I'm after.
Plan to use TM to back up....

12 PB-1.25Ram-2x250LaCie D2-SoundStix-20"LCD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

I see you have striped 2 raptors as a boot drive... any problems..?
Wicked fast?

No problems, it's very important to Disk Utility Erase w/Zero each drive before making the set. In fact it's best to Zero every drive once before even using it to eliminate any bad sectors caused by rough handling. (will totally destroy all existing data)

I get 185 MB per second 4k uncached writes with just a boot installed, it's slowed a bit to 150 MB p/s because it's about 65% filled now. (still about 3x faster than a stock drive 🙂 )



You suggest making a clone as opposed to striping them?

Cloning involves using software that will "clone" a boot drive and make sure it does things to make the second drive a bootable version of the first.

Just duplicating a boot drive doesn't make it bootable or copy all files necessary, hidden or copy protected.

See Carbon Copy Cloner forums or search Apple for DejaVu.


"Striping" (or RAID O) is a performance option (via Apple's Disk Utility) to substancially increase the read and write speed performance by using multiple drives to split the data path. Lose one drive and you lose all the data on all the drives in the set.

To get a boot RAID O one must clone a OS from a another drive onto the stripe set, as well as clone the RAID O to another drive regularly. (as one should be doing regardless as a great backup method, just hold option and boot off the clone.)

More advice here


http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2921898#2921898

Boy, your Lamborghini info is way out dated! They've been able to exceed 200MPH for some time now. 😉

The drives I bought recently were all WD RE series (enterprise raid edition) with longer burn in period. None had any bad sectors. all work well.

I had a Hitachi 7K250 (before the "T7K250" were out or would have chosen that which I also have bought) that did have a number of bad blocks, and which a ZERO ALL did not fix or repair fully. I had to use 7-way write for that.

All of my testiing for bad blocks since June 2005 is with Speed Tools Media Scanner from Intech.

I think it is good to give a new drive a workout, break in period, loosen up from copying files to and from 100% of the drive. But I am not sure about the need to zero drives. Possible. But I would rather spend more on drives that are more likely to have had a proper burn in before shipping.

A Raptor RAID - if you keep the drives 65% FREE makes a good default scratch volume for Photoshop.

I just received my Mac Pro and went to install OS X on a 74GB Raptor from my G5, but it said it couldn't boot from that drive and wouldn't install OS X on it. I tried 2 other 1.5Gb/s SATA drives with the same result. I haven't found an official answer yet, but I'm assuming it's because the bus speed is only 1.5 Gb/s.

Darryl - What is on the other drives? Were they erased first? have your G5 system? There are ZERO problem using older SATA drives in Mac Pro.

Also seems like you are "hijacking" this and other threads dealing with the 150GB Raptor. And answered in your other thread that you cannot use a system with a PPC OS on it without first erasing first.

G4 MDD WD 320 OEM 9600 1.75GB SoftAID 3 Mac OS X (10.4.7) Mac Pro "rev 2" (hopefully)

I need to mention some things about RAID O -ing a boot drive.

First off it's risky, lose one drive and you lose data on all drives. Auto cloning and auto backup software like DejaVu is a must. Plus Zeroing all drives before making the RAID O set. Your suicidal if you RAID 0 more drives than you can auto clone/backup the contents to a single drive under a hour.

Second there is only so much the performance will translate into faster Mac OS X and app performance. A single 10,000 RPM Raptor is enough for both as a boot drive. Keeping files on a second drive has been tested to be faster because it allows the machine to use both drives at once, no wait.

The speed effect's of a RAID O only comes in handy with large file duplication, unless one has another RAID O to transfer files to, one is limited by the slowest interface or drive when copying.

400 MB p/s, 260 MB p/s or 180 Mb p/s is really irrellevant unless your using this speed on a constant basis. Like constant +20GB file/folder duplications, in the low end there is no benefit, all the time savings come in the long haul.

Much like having 4 processors, it can't make a small job faster, but it can be more like a bulldozer with large jobs.


When I got my Raptors there was no 150GB model, only 74GB which I ran out of space and wound up RAID O (striping) them for speed and space. The speed I hardly use in general purpose use.

When the 150GB version came out, Barefeats did some tests and found out there was no difference between a this drive and a RAID O pair of Raptors because there is only so fast Mac OS X can go.

They found out a Raptor as a boot/app/bare bones home/itunes drive and files on another drive was actually faster than a RAID O as a boot. It's also safer as the failure rate of the RAID O set multiplies with the more drives in the set.

If your considering RAID 0 four drives, especially large ones, think again. Most likely your not going to be using either the speed or space and taking considerable risk with your data.

Finally!

That's the answer I've been looking for all along.

So...
how do I put the Home folder on a second drive...symbolic link?
That's like an alias? Where can I find info on setting that up?

TIA

12 PB-1.25Ram-2x250LaCie D2-SoundStix-20"LCD Mac OS X (10.4.7)