back to article WD lets loose ferocious 1TB VelociRaptor

WD has boosted the capacity of its 10K VelociRaptor disk drive, jumping to a 1TB capacity from the current 600GB. Otherwise it's the mixture as before: 10,000rpm and a 6Gbit/s SATA interface, but with a cache doubled to 64MB. There is the same IcePack 3.5-inch mounting frame/heat sink. The capacity points are 250GB, 500GB and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd have one of these in an instant. I have one of the older ones and it is still like shit off a shovel - one of the best upgrades I ever made.

  2. John Lawton

    Nice, but what about production of other WD drives?

    Nice drives, but I've been trying to get hold of some larger WD2002DAEX 2TB drives for a reasonable price for ages now, I wish they'd fix the production of these to bring down the price a bit.

  3. Geoff Campbell Silver badge
    Boffin

    Wait, what?

    "WD has more than doubled the capacity of its 10K VelociRaptor disk drive, jumping to a 1TB capacity from the current 600GB."

    Calculator broken, chaps?

    GJC

    1. Phil W
      Joke

      Re: Wait, what?

      I thought the same.

      8bit 600GB drive and 16bit 1TB drive or something?

      1. Danny 14

        Re: Wait, what?

        or (god forbid!) have the techies labelled the 1Tb so you actually GET 1tb rather than a "marketing" 600tb (500tb)?

    2. davidzzz
      Joke

      Re: Wait, what?

      In today's economic climate, 600 -> 1000 is indeed more than double.

    3. Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face

      Re: Wait, what?

      They've taken a leaf from broadband advertisers. You actually get "up to" 1TB

      ;-)

  4. Ilgaz

    Plain lie

    Momentus keeps statistics of most read accessed sectors and decides to put them in nand. It has nothing to do with writes, it can't make a stupid decision like "lets keep writing to nand instead of magnetic". It MAY decide "lets put this constantly accessed video effect dll sectors in flash so it will be read faster".

    Don't they have any clue about their rivals product or are they playing ignorant?

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Plain lie

      Why are you asking the question when you know the answer :)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too late.

    Just gone solid state. The electricity I save alone, pays the interest on the price difference.

    1. JEDIDIAH
      Devil

      Re: Too late.

      So how much does that 1TB SSD of yours cost?

      It must be putting power back on the grid to be able to make up for it's price.

      1. Danny 14
        Boffin

        Re: Too late.

        Even a super super conservative 30W difference means that at a whopping 12p per kwh (based on 8760 hours per year) you would save an enormous £32 a year. I'd imagine you'd need 4 SSDs to make up for one of these raptors so you should break even in about 15 years.

        that being said, with 4 SSDs your power consumption would be worse off so no you're talking shite afterall.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Too late.

          To be fair he did say pays the interest.

          Not pays the difference.

          Imagining there was £100 difference per drive and that there were 4 drives - £400. Interest at I dunno lets say 6% is £24 a year.

          Not sure what that's supposed to mean but he is technically in the right ball park!

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Too late.

            Thanks for noticing that.

            As it happens it's even better than that. Because I did it side by side, all scientific like, with another box. On a relatively simple build, dev, test cycle, my compatriot sat around for over half an hour a day waiting on deployment, and I didn't.

            So that means on say a relatively modest £400 quid a day for an employee, you're making £25+ a day on the deal. This buys the hard drives outright in under two months, from which point you're saving 125 quid a week in employment costs. So 11 months minus holidays, at 125 quid a week, is 40 * 125 == 5K a year net savings.

            The costs are not just the price, as I'm sure Mr ChriZ has worked out.

            In investment banks, simply SSDing all their dev hardware would get their front office bugs fixed hours earlier.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Too late.

          I said pays the interest on the difference. That's all it needs to do, as all the drives are effectively worthless, due to technology advancements five years from now. Inflation has made the capital difference pointless too.

          As it happens it saves far more than 30 Watts, because I can shut down most of the hardware for long periods of time, due to lack of boot time. The CPU isn't sitting there waiting for the disk.

          It's the same argument as not buying double glazing. The extra heating costs don't justify the loan to pay for it.

          Two Kingston 480GB disks are 1 grand. from Amazon. Even if your drive is free, the interest on my two drives, at 3.5% is only 35 quid. Bearing in mind what I'd get for putting my grand in a bank, which is less than half a percent, then is it worth it? I think not.

          10K Rpm raptor versus two Kingston SSDs, striped. Well, I'm afraid it's game over for rotating.

          1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
            Paris Hilton

            Re: Too late.

            I don't get this at all.

            You are already in crack-up boom mode, so you buy the SSDs, is that it?

            Don't forget that you might have to replace them in a hurry at some future point in time, possibly just as the guarantee expires.

        3. Dave 126 Silver badge
          Meh

          Re: Too late.

          @Danny 14

          Good on you for throwing some numbers at the problem. Always a good exercise, and can always be refined afterwards:

          It might be the PC we are considering spends much of its time transferring files. When this job is completed, the entire PC will shut down, saving the energy that is consumed by the rest of the system components. The power consumption of the SSDs versus that of the HDDs isn't the only consideration, is all.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Momentus

    Good drives, but are they shipping 3.5 inch versions yet? I have a 2.5 inch in my laptop and confirm its great for the apps you use every day. But for the workstation I'm not keen on using a 2.5 inch drive

    1. Danny 14
      Trollface

      Re: Momentus

      prey tell why? Form factor envy?

      1. Toastan Buttar
        Headmaster

        Re: Momentus

        "Pray". 'Prey' is what animals do to the other creatures that they eat to survive,

    2. Fuzz

      Re: Momentus

      you do realise that most servers these days are using 2.5" drives? The smaller drives generally have faster access times because the heads move less distance. The only reason for using larger drives is capacity, if the 2.5" drive provides the capacity you need then there's no reason to use it in your workstation.

      1. Arrrggghh-otron

        Re: Momentus

        It took me a while to be comfortable with the idea of 2.5" hard drives in servers.

        I think that was down to seeing lots and lots of failed 2.5" drives over the years, as they were mainly used in laptops that were kicked about a bit before being presented for repair.

        Having had servers running happily on 2.5" drives for a couple of years now (I'm not going to talk about how reliable they are as that is just tempting fate) I would be happy to run a 2.5" HD in anything.

        That said, my aging desktop still boots of a raid 0 pair of 36GB first generation Raptors and is still pretty quick. I would ditch the raptors for SSD if they would die, but they won't. They are solidly built and seriously reliable.

    3. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

      Re: Momentus

      Me to, as I am lazy I want one big drive for a decent price for everything rather than several.

      I am aware it won't be as fast as ssd for booting but I don't want to pay for a laptop drive that doesn't have as much space (My HD duplicator also requires the new drive be the same size or bigger).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Survivability

    I've built (read: cobbled together) a few machines with the older generation of this drive. SSD was too expensive then, it is still expensive now.

    One advantage of the spinning medium is survivability. In case it crashes, data on SSD's are notoriously hard to recollect. On hard drives the task is possible.

    (I do my backup thank you. But you never know)

    1. PaulR79

      Re: Survivability

      I was under the distinct impression that SSDs fail to read-only when they fail. Is this not so or are you telling porkies? Genuine question.

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Survivability

      Good point. However, I was under the impression that an SSD was more likely to survive being dropped on the floor... perhaps the best back up / mirrored solution would use a mixed bag, in the hope that whatever catastrophe befell you, something would survive?

      1. Nigel 11

        Re: Survivability

        A SSD is more likely to survive being dropped - especially being dropped while active! A SSD may be more likely to turn into a brick without warning. Ordinary HDs often degrade slowly, and you can see the developing need to replace them by monitoring the SMART info (especially Reallocations). This is especially true is they are running continuously in a server, rather than being banged around in a laptop. Often it's also possible to recover almost all the data using a tool like ddrescue that retries intelligently.

        But never neglect your backups. Some hard drives do turn into bricks without warning. About a third of the failures, if I remember Google's statistics right. My gut feeling is that it's a lower percentage today.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ssd v spinny discs ???

    why all this row over SSDs V spinning discs ? SSDs are quicker, Spinny discs have more GB / unit-of-money.

    I've got both in my machine . 60 GB of SSD to dual boot Linux and, if I may swear, occassionally WinXP . 2TB spinny disc for all my pictures n data other stuff . Works for me.

    Oh and I had an older velociraptor , it was quick before it broke.

  9. Wombling_Free
    Unhappy

    As long as it is actually cheaper...

    Living as I do in Austfailia, we have the pretty steep 'it has to be imported by row-boat, can't get the wood you know, more than me job's worth mate' tax so there isn't a lot of difference in price between velociraptor and SSD - both are pure unaffordium.

  10. Christian Berger

    I still don't get it

    I mean harddisks, particulary such small ones, are only used on initial program load. After that you'll have all the code you need in RAM.

    Hybrid disks seem like the old "RAM-disk cards" people had in the past, where you had an ISA-card with, perhaps a megabyte of RAM you couldn't use directly, but only as a disk. Or the harddisk controllers with built-in cache RAM. Those all died out when we moved to 386s with a 32 Bit address space, giving "unlimited" amounts of RAM.

    Now we have 64 Bit address spaces. It's fairly cheap to have 16 gigs of RAM now.

    1. Dr. Mouse

      Re: I still don't get it

      "I mean harddisks, particulary such small ones, are only used on initial program load. After that you'll have all the code you need in RAM... It's fairly cheap to have 16 gigs of RAM now."

      And what about that first load? Or cold boot? Or if you have more than 16GB of data you wish to deal with quickly.

      IIRC it's about £60 for 16GB RAM. Yes, this is pretty cheap, but for around that you could get a 60GB SSD, allowing your OS & at least most programmes to be kept on it, improving both boot and initial programme load times.

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: I still don't get it

      I was looking into the same sort of issues, when trying to work out whether to use 'Readyboost'... most of the time I'm using less than half my RAM (4GB total) and a 7,200 HDD so figured I didn't need a crutch designed for Vista-era machines. I should suck-it-and-see though: Test, don't guess.

      1. TeeCee Gold badge
        Happy

        Re: I still don't get it

        Having a Velociraptor, a Win 7 machine with plenty of RAM and a spare, fast 8Gb memory stick, I have already tried this.

        The answer is it makes absolutely bugger all difference, bar adding another flashing light to the box.

        I reckon you probably need a USB3 stick and port to see any advantage that isn't chewed up by the overhead of running ReadyBoost in the first place when the spinning HDD is already fast.

        Now, there were rumours when Win 7 was in gestation that it would provide the ability to tie an HDD and a small SSD together, to provide something like a DIY Momentus XT without the size limitations. Shame it never turned up. That'd be interesting, if only to see the interminable flame wars over the best SSD to HDD ratio this would undoubtably cause......

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Noise? Heat?

    Not that hdds make the racket that they once did, but the fans keeping the whole system cool can make up for that if they produce a heap of heat.

    I try to keep the noise levels minimum (silent would be nice, but I can't achieve it, especially at tropical 30C ambient) a the machine is a home/general/music machine. Would this disk fit in that scenario?

    1. Dave Robinson
      Happy

      Re: Noise? Heat?

      Velociraptors, being 10K rpm, have a more pleasant (ie. less noticable) seeking noise. Also, they use less electricity than even the green 3.5" drives.

      I have a system with a 60GB SSD, a 600GB Velociraptor, a cheap Scythe cooler on an Intel i5, and an unbelievably cheap (and quiet) eBuyer-special PSU. It sits under my desk at home, and is inaudible even when the house is completely silent.

      I keep all the "bulk" data and applications I rarely use on the Velociraptor, because I don't trust SSDs (yet), and couldn't afford a big enough one!

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Incomplete

    > undercuts 15,000rpm drives like Seagate's 600GB Cheetah while holding more data.

    How exactly?

    And access and transfer times would be nice in an article about performance disks and disk performance.

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