back to article 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 …

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  1. The BigYin

    Who needs a big SSD?

    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.

    1. HMTK

      what OS?

      Still using DOS 6.22?

  2. Gordon 10
    Stop

    Errr Sata 3 helps how?

    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.

    1. SynnerCal
      Thumb Up

      Why you 'need' Sata3

      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? ;)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Paris Hilton

        I've raided some of the SATA 2 VRs

        ..after first generation SSDs proved way too unreliable even on reads. Made a dirty four drive RAID 0 for video playout, 1080p120 uncompressed demo reel, the damn things never missed a beat. I'm a fan of those little beasties.

    2. TeeCee Gold badge
      Thumb Down

      It is a limit.

      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.

      1. gordon 1

        Missing my point

        Its still a limit for a HDD

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      note the mention of a large cache..

      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!

  3. Maliciously Crafted Packet

    WD Scorpio Black 7200rpm

    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.

  4. foobie

    80 gigs of SSD goodness for same price

    We've been finding that an 80GB Intel SSD (http://store.cbccomputers.com/products.asp?partno=SSDSA2MH080G2R5 £175 inc VAT) is more than enough. And it trounces the velociraptors in day to day usage.

  5. Wallyb132
    Pint

    Its too bad...

    Its too bad that WD's 10k RPM drives wont run in a laptop, if they did, you could sign me up for 2 of them...

  6. Bounty

    is 80 Gb enough?

    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.

  7. Phil101
    Stop

    More vs As

    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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