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Patriot SSD Photocopies Page out of VelociRaptor Handbook

Paul Lilly — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:00:10 -0500

At a glance, it'd be easy to mistake Patriot's newest Warp SSD for a Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive. That's because like the VelociRaptor, Patriot plans to include a bracket with the Warp drive that converts the 2.5-inch drive into a 3.5-inch form factor.

Keep in mind that Western Digital's IcePAK was designed to help keep its 10K RPM hard drive cool. Patriot's bracket, which Fudzilla says is made out of aircraft-grade aluminum, will undoubtedly lend additional cooling prowess to the Warp SSD, but SSDs don't typically get hot in the first place.

As for the drive itself, the third-gen SSD checks in at 256GB and boasts increasingly common read and write speeds of 240MB/s and 160MB/s, respectively.

No word yet on availability or price, however according to Fudzilla, Patriot plans to give the bracket away for free with the Warp SSD.

Image Credit: Fudzilla

The Coolest SSD Mod Ever!

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:15:39 -0500

SSD’s are hot, but how do you mount your new 2.5-inch solid state drive in a 3.5-inch bay without it looking ghettolicious?

The answer: Use a VelociRaptor’s extruded aluminum shell with Intel’s wicked fast SSD. The result is one a combination even better than peanut butter and chocolate if we may so say our selves.

Does it make sense to do this with a live VelociRaptor? Probably not, but we just happened to have a dead unit and rather than toss it in the garbage, we shucked out the dead drive by removing the four Torqx screws and mounted the Intel X25-M in its place. You can actually do this with a live VelociRaptor but you’ll immediately void the warranty on the drive. Does an SSD need all that aluminum to keep it cool? The answer is no, but it sure looks cool, right?

Raiding The Raptors

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:47:48 -0500

I have a brand-new rig that sports two WD Raptors in a mirrored array. I wanted the speed of the Raptors and the convenience of a mirrored array. But I wonder if a mirrored or striped array (1+0, 0+1, or some other RAID number) using four 7,200rpm drives would be faster than the above array. And how would the price compare?

—David Thiel

As a matter of fact, the Doctor’s underlings have compared the speeds of various RAID configurations (November 2007). With Western Digital’s Raptor drives, we found that a four-drive 1+0 setup will outperform a two-drive mirrored array any day of the week. However, since a 1+0 setup requires twice as many drives as a mirrored array, it will cost twice as much to create.

As for whether four cheaper drives in a 1+0 setup would outperform a mirrored Raptor array, it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. A mirrored array of drives doesn’t offer a gigantic performance increase over just a single drive. There’s an increase, yes, but nowhere near what a striped array offers.

Given that you can now purchase drives that are both larger and cheaper than Western Digital’s Raptor, the Doctor thinks your best choice is to invest in cheaper drives and create a 1+0 array.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.

Western Digital Velociraptor

David Murphy — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:00:00 -0500

We’ve seen this day coming for a long time. There was no way that Western Digital was going to sit back and let other manufacturers usurp the Raptor’s place at the top of the storage speed charts. Consider the rule of the speedy terabyte drives a hiccup on the timeline. The Raptor is back: upgraded, renamed, and… physically smaller.

Don't try to pull the drive off its IcePack and install it in your notebook. The Velociraptor's power requirements will prevent it from running.

To maximize the Velociraptor’s speeds, Western Digital has shrunk the size of the hard drive to 2.5 inches. This seems counterintuitive, given that Samsung has been able to achieve a tremendous combination of speed and storage with its 3.5-inch drives. Western Digital’s smaller form allows the Velociraptor to consume less power than its 3.5-inch counterparts, and the drive heads don’t have to travel as far to reach the data. The downside is that these smaller platters will always trail in data/platter.

But consumers and OEM manufacturers buy Raptor drives for a single reason—and it isn’t storage capacity. Given the Velociraptor’s read and write speeds, its 300GB capacity is actually a bonus. The Velociraptor is twice as spacious as its Raptor predecessor and significantly faster.

We can safely crown the Velociraptor the fastest consumer-grade hard drive on the market. Its two 150GB platters spin at 10,000rpm, creating an 18 percent improvement in our PCMark test over Samsung’s HD103UJ terabyte drive. In our synthetic HD Tach benchmark, the Velociraptor beat out the HD103UJ’s read times by 11.6MB/s. The difference shot up to 15.6MB/s when comparing the drives’ write speeds.

This Velociraptor is Western Digital’s second iteration in the line, coming a scant few months after the initial launch of the product. Why the refresh? The first version of the hard drive centered the drive atop the device’s IcePack mounting frame, rendering the drive impossible to use in a hotswap interface. Reps at Western Digital have told us that this first line of Velociraptor drives is scheduled for extinction. The company will phase out these drives in favor of the revision B units unless consumers clamor for the original build—an unlikely scenario.

If you want the fastest consumer-grade hard drive on the market, the Velociraptor is it, with twice the capacity of its Raptor predecessor and a 59 percent speed advantage. If we could ding Western Digital for shafting early adopters with the hotswap issue, we would. But the company’s speedy fix has ensured our praise. You might be able to find a drive with a better price-per-gigabyte ratio, but certainly not one that’s faster.

Western Digital Announces 2.5-Inch 10K RPM Velociraptor

Paul Lilly — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:39:34 -0500

While the rest of the computing world inexplicably refuses to see a market for performance hard drives spinning faster than 7,200RPM, Western Digital is finding new segments for its flagship 10,000RPM Velociraptor. The company announced today it's shrinking the stupid-fast drive down to a 2.5-inch form factor for use in blade servers and 1U and 2U servers.

"WD is bringing to enterprise customers what PC enthusiasts already appreciate about the WD Velociraptor: a combination of high performance and high capacity for hard drive storage," said John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives.

Because server environments tend to be more mission critical than the average desktop, Western Digital claims its new enterprise model will be up to the job with the "highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF."

The shrunken Velociraptor will come in both 300GB and 150GB capacities. Will anyone else join them?

Image Credit: Western Digital

Western Digital Velociraptor

David Murphy — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:13:59 -0500

We've taken a look at engineering samples of Western Digital’s speedy new Velociraptor drive. Now that we have our hands on a final version of the drive, we’re ready to deliver a full review of the big beast itself. And not surprisingly, it’s every bit as fast as we anticipated.

This 300GB drive is made up of two 150GB platters that spin around at 10,000 RPM—the signature speed of the Raptor line. Western Digital is able to hit unprecedented speeds for a consumer-level drive this time around by shrinking the Velociraptor’s size to a 2.5-inch design. This reduces the size of the platters in turn, resulting in increased read and write speeds compared to a typical 3.5-inch storage device.

We saw excellent performance when running the Velociraptor through our synthetic and real-world storage benchmarks. The former had the Velociraptor pushing average read and write speeds of 108.4 MB/s and 100 MB/s, respectively. And the latter, represented by our PCMark05 benchmark, netted the Velociraptor a score 18 percent faster than our former speed demon, Samsung’s three-platter HD103UJ terabyte drive. Hands down, the Velociraptor is the quickest drive we’ve ever tested.

But it’s not perfect.

Western Digital has told us that the Velociraptor—at least, this version—is not a notebook drive. It’s designed strictly for desktop and enterprise environments, hence the large, black heatsink that supports the 2.5-inch drive. This is the Velociraptor’s thermal-padded "IcePak." It's a name given rather unnecessarily, as the drive portion of the Veloricaptor package actually feels cooler to the touch than most hard drives we’ve tested.

The IcePak doubles as a mounting mechanism to make the Velociraptor fit snugly within a case’s standard 3.5-inch drive bay. What doesn’t work with this drive, however, are hot-swapping mechanisms, like those found in a number of NAS boxes, external enclosures, and next-generation cases. And this isn’t a “wiggle it” version of not-working. The Velociraptor is incompatible with any configuration that requires you to slide the drive into fixed power and SATA connectors.

It’s a maddening issue that could have been easily fixed by, say, moving the 2.5-inch drive over a wee bit in the proper direction in the IcePak carriage. And although shifting the drive's positioning would invalidate the IcePak's supposed effectiveness, it's a trade-off we’re perfectly happy to make in order to be able to use the Velociraptor with a number of devices that it, being a hard drive, should fit. What good are killer speeds if you can’t even use them?

Crossing Velociraptors

David Murphy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:31:36 -0500

You've seen the benchmarks. Everyone's been cooing about Western Digital's Velociraptor drive--us included--since the moment the early versions of the drives started hitting reviewers' doors. Some sites reviewed early versions of the drive as-is, others noted that these models were engineering samples. In practice, I think the latter is the best route, and that's just what Maximum PC did. Especially since Western Digital promised speed improvements in upwards of ten percent once they finished tweaking the drive's firmware for its final iteration.

Now that the fateful day has come, I've been curious to see just how much extra juice they could pull out of this speedy little monster. Here's a look at the before-and-after:

BENCHMARKS
	WD Velociraptor (old)	WD Velociraptor (new)	Percent change
HDTach Burst (MB/s)	255.1	249.7	-2.11%
HDTach Random Access (ms)	7.1	7.1	0.00%
HDTach Average Read (MB/s)	104.6	108.4	3.63%
HDTach Average Write (MB/s)	96.7	100	3.41%
PCMark05 Overall	9457	9450	-0.07%
All HDTach scores use HDTach 3.0.1.0. Best scores are bolded.

What do these numbers tell us? Western Digital's tweaked the performance of the drive, obviously. But the faster read and write speeds are nothing to write home about. Remember, HDTach is more a diagnostics tool than anything else. It's great for determining potential problems for your drives, but its access patterns don't replicate the real-world experience you would encounter. For that, we turn to PCMark05. And as you can see, the performance difference is negligible--probably even within an acceptable random variance were we to run the benchmark ten separate times.

I'm still going to review finished hardware. It's the Maximum PC way. And the Velociraptor is still the fastest consumer-grade hard drive one can buy. But its performance -- while mildly different in a synthetic benchmark -- isn't as "tweaked" as we expected given Western Digital's claims.

Check out the full review of Western Digital's Velociraptor drive!

No BS Podcast #65: The Revenge of the Smith Edition

The Maximum PC Staff — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:39:26 -0500

Dave, Will, Gordon, and Andy tackle all the huge tech news of the week on the 65th go-around of this awesome podcast, featuring stories like:

Why AMD (and not Intel) Wants a Tri-Core Processor
Why the Velociraptor is the fastest consumer-level hard drive around
Why Nvidia thinks GPUs are the future (go figure!)
Why we think this GUI for websites is awesome. (this one is ok too)

As always, we chat about our crazy goings-on in the Maximum PC lab, and answer each-and-every one of your reader questions... that's under 60 seconds in length.

Do you have a tech question? A comment? A tale of technological triumph? Email us at maximumpcpodcast@gmail.com or call our 24-hour No BS Podcast hotline at 877.404.1337 x1337.

Ready to crush the editors of Maximum PC in Team Fortress 2? Join our Steam group. Feel like stalking us? Check out our Facebook Page.

Modders and modding aficionados, head on over to Mod Shop! Check out all the entries in this month's crazy comic-themed modding contest! Submit and vote on the coolest mods around—and win prizes!

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