Speculation takes flight over 5th generation Velociraptor Western Digital is reported to be working on a fifth generation of its 2.5-inch Velociraptor drive, with capacity doubled up to 600GB. The Velociraptor is a fast, at 10,000rpm, small form factor drive using the 3Gbit/s SATA interface which has gained a lot of popularity due to its combination of speed and performance. It is …
An entire OS (including all applications) can sit quite happily in under 4GB. So at most you'd need an 8GB SSD (allowing a lot of wiggle room and should still be fairly cheap). Data can then be held on a standard HDD and mounted transparently into the filesystem.
Unless your OS and apps are bloated to hell of course.
How will a sata 3 interface speed up the raptor series? Even Intels Ssd's have trouble saturating a Sata 2 link.
Im sure there are some incremental improvements that make Sata 3 faster than sata 2 for the same drive, but Im betting they arent significant enough to justify the upgrade.
Bragging rights - that's all. After all if you're trying to achieve nerd-vana, and bigging up that you've got some multicore monster with a RAID of these new 'raptors, then having to admit to 'merely' using old-fashioned Sata2 is going to knock the shine off.
Joking aside I can kind of appreciate WD's forward thinking in spec'ing the new drives with the fastest interface generally available (and yes I know about SAS, FC, etc - but this is desktop's we're talking about).
That said, I'm thinking that a quartet of the new 'raptors (RAID0+1 array or similar) would be a great choice for a "data" store with a RAID1 pair of the new high-speed SSD's for OS and programs. Second mortgage time perhaps? ;)
OCZ Colossus SATA 2 SSD: Read 260 MB/s, Write 260MB/s (sustained write 140MB/s).
Reads and writes the same speed? How fishy. Could 260MB/s be somewhere around the theoretical maximum of SATA 2? I believe it could.
OCZ Z-Drive PCIe x8 SSD (exactly the same internals shoved on a PCIe x8 card): Read 870MB/s, Write 780MB/s (sustained write 600MB/s - OMFG!).
QED.
The faster interface will mostly help with burst speeds on small files- useful on a boot drive, often.
That said, the 10k 3.5 inch raptor that this machine boots from is 150 meg SATA, and none the worse for it, I don't thing the drive can saturate the link very often.. However, the improvement from a faster interface is there, it's real. If you are buying a performance part like that, it's nice to have features that help rather than hinder performance, even in a small way,
If you want a "value" hard drive, there are many excellent options, the velociraptor line is a (very useful) specialist part. Very nice they are too!
I stuffed a WD Scorpio Black 7200rpm into my Mac mini (putty knife method) replacing the built in 5200rpm drive. I also and upped the ram to 4GB whilst I was at it. It now whizzes along very nicely and makes for a great little web and database server. I'll likely be tempted to stuff one of these 10000rpm jobbies in once they come available at a decent price.
For SSD's you want to leave at least 30% unused, so now you're down to 56 GB. Windows 7 will eat up 15 of that. Set aside another 4 for swap file. 10 Gb for apps, 10 Gb for misc media and you're only left with 17 GB for games. That's like 3 games. I regularly switch between more than 3 games so I would need to spend at least another hundred bucks on a separate 'data' drive. Which would still load games at the regular speed. I guess windows would still boot faster, but web browsing and opening .PDF's isn't exactly slow on modern drives anyways. SSD price/size ratio still need to come down.
More implies an increase against a base so the cost is only 2.7 times more expensive (but 3.7 times as expensive). This is something that is increasingly prevalent in advertising - my toothpaste is apparently 2x better than it was. Do they mean that it is 3x as good as it was or really only twice as good?
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