Worlds Fastest SATA Disk

[jdvmi]

Can't wait for this bad boy to be released Western Digital launches world's fastest SATA disk: the 300GB VelociRaptor - Engadget

[mixerguy]

Originally Posted by jdvmi

Can't wait for this bad boy to be released Western Digital launches world's fastest SATA disk: the 300GB VelociRaptor - Engadget

looks COOL



gotta get me one for my laptop

(not)

[wakestyle]

sick!

[Football]

That is a wacky looking case, would that fit in a Mac Pro?

[Matteran]

it only fits in the optical drive slots in a computer case, it's too big for a regular HDD slot

So if you only got 1 optical drive, then yeah in theory it would fit.

[Dean7]

Originally Posted by Matteran

it only fits in the optical drive slots in a computer case, it's too big for a regular HDD slot

So if you only got 1 optical drive, then yeah in theory it would fit.

Incorrect. It's the same form-factor as a regular 3.5" desktop HDD.

-Dean

[Flying_Dutchman]

Buy Sata-N, its 666"

[allencollins]

Serial SCSI is still much faster. In fact so is Fibre Channel SCSI and most SCA 15k SCSI's for that matter. If your gonna drop 300 you might as well get a pro SCSI setup.

SATA drives still have the SATA controller bottleneck

[simonv]

oh, nice piece of gear!

I'd put two of those in RAID-performance.. That should probably allow me to finally track vox + guitar at the same time!!

[jcschild]

Originally Posted by allencollins

Serial SCSI is still much faster. In fact so is Fibre Channel SCSI and most SCA 15k SCSI's for that matter. If your gonna drop 300 you might as well get a pro SCSI setup.

SATA drives still have the SATA controller bottleneck

once again you couldnt be more wrong..

1) SCSI has no place in pro audio anymore and hasnt for 4-5 yrs. and now has no place in video editing either.
SCSI/FC is only good for Corporate high tracactional low seak time needs.

take a look at all the high end external storage for video they are ALL Sata or at best SAS (which is sata) (Sonnet, Gtech, Avid etc)

2) SAS (serial attached SCSI) is SATA so much for you botlleneck comment.
3) SAS and FC and nearly indentical in speed.
3b) SAta and Sas are not that differnet in speed (lower seak times is the big benefit to SAS)
4) the WD Velociraptor is beating most SCSI drives even at the seak times.
5) drop $300 hmmm lets think about that
A) a good scsi controller is $300 add to that a SCSI drive which is tiny, hot, loud
now we are up to $600
B) you just lost a valueable PCI/PCIe slot to a useless SCSI drive.

i would recommend not posting unless you have the facts. wouldnt want to steer someone wrong would you?

Scott
ADK

[The Beatsmith]

unfortunately, this doesn't work in our mac pro's, not unless WD make a mac specific icepack enclosure :(

[Lissajous]

nice

[aussie_techie]

Originally Posted by jcschild

SAS (serial attached SCSI) is SATA

what the i think you need to go back and check how these things actually work. the connectors might be the same but the controllers are still different.

Originally Posted by jcschild

a good scsi controller is $300 add to that a SCSI drive which is tiny, hot, loud
now we are up to $600

you said it your self, you have to have a SAS controller. you cant run an SAS drive on a SATA controller.

SAS drives are used by enterprise because they can be faster. plain and simple, being worthwhile for the general market is a different issue.

[dkatz42]

You don't need any of this if your software is up to snuff.

The reason that fast drives have been necessary for audio is that the disk buffers have been way too small in DAWs (dating from the days when RAM was rare and expensive), resulting in zillions of small reads, which in turn results in zillions of head seeks, which are the limiting factor (not the transfer rates, which even on the cheapest crap drives are an order of magnitude faster than necessary even for significant track counts.)

Apple finally got their act together with LP8 and threw a bunch of RAM (a few tens of MB by my back-of-the-envelope calculations) at disk buffering, and now I can run 30+ tracks at 24/96 off of a cheapo FW400 pocket drive (or the internal drive) on my MBP and the disk is idle about 90% of the time (it gets hit once every couple of seconds and snoozes in between.) This has no impact on latency, and gives radical performance improvements. Go beat up your DAW vendor if you're getting "disk too slow" errors, as this is a trivial thing to fix.

[docbop]

Originally Posted by dkatz42

You don't need any of this if your software is up to snuff.

The reason that fast drives have been necessary for audio is that the disk buffers have been way too small in DAWs (dating from the days when RAM was rare and expensive), resulting in zillions of small reads, which in turn results in zillions of head seeks, which are the limiting factor (not the transfer rates, which even on the cheapest crap drives are an order of magnitude faster than necessary even for significant track counts.)

Apple finally got their act together with LP8 and threw a bunch of RAM (a few tens of MB by my back-of-the-envelope calculations) at disk buffering, and now I can run 30+ tracks at 24/96 off of a cheapo FW400 pocket drive (or the internal drive) on my MBP and the disk is idle about 90% of the time (it gets hit once every couple of seconds and snoozes in between.) This has no impact on latency, and gives radical performance improvements. Go beat up your DAW vendor if you're getting "disk too slow" errors, as this is a trivial thing to fix.

Fast spindle speed drive speed up your entire system. Beside the disk rotating back around faster for missed reads and write, but if you OS and virtual memory is on the fast drives all their access is speed up too. That's why enterprise class drives are 15K RPM and higher. The drawback is faster spindles generate more heat.

[dkatz42]

Originally Posted by docbop

Fast spindle speed drive speed up your entire system. Beside the disk rotating back around faster for missed reads and write, but if you OS and virtual memory is on the fast drives all their access is speed up too. That's why enterprise class drives are 15K RPM and higher. The drawback is faster spindles generate more heat.

The good news is that we're not running enterprise servers, we're running DAWs. Drives like this are necessary for enterprise servers because they are always loading apps or swapping. For us, we generally buy tons of RAM (an enterprise server doesn't have nearly as much RAM per user) in order to avoid swapping altogether, and we're running a couple of applications for long periods of time instead of dozens constantly.

Your application may load a fraction of a second faster with a screamingly fast disk, but unless you're doing something extremely disk I/O intensive (much more so than a DAW) it's not going to be particularly noticeable.

Put another way, unless things are really screwed up, when you're running your DAW pretty much the *only* disk I/O is going to be reading and writing audio files, and as long as that I/O is fast enough to keep up, there will be no performance improvement (and if it isn't fast enough, things will come to a grinding halt.) The primary reason for fast drives was to keep the margin of audio I/O performance above the breaking point, and throwing RAM buffers at the problem is vastly more cost effective (and has vastly larger performance benefits.) If you read 10x more data per read, your seek count drops 90%, and that's where the performance penalty is, and the amount of additional RAM is in the noise (less than 1% of what most people run in their machines these days.)

Samplers push the envelope considerably, but read-ahead and cacheing can solve these problems for everything other than live performance.

Spending too much money on disk drives is going the same way that spending too much on outboard DSP hardware is going, happily.

[docbop]

Originally Posted by dkatz42

The good news is that we're not running enterprise servers, we're running DAWs. Drives like this are necessary for enterprise servers because they are always loading apps or swapping. For us, we generally buy tons of RAM (an enterprise server doesn't have nearly as much RAM per user) in order to avoid swapping altogether, and we're running a couple of applications for long periods of time instead of dozens constantly.

Your application may load a fraction of a second faster with a screamingly fast disk, but unless you're doing something extremely disk I/O intensive (much more so than a DAW) it's not going to be particularly noticeable.

Put another way, unless things are really screwed up, when you're running your DAW pretty much the *only* disk I/O is going to be reading and writing audio files, and as long as that I/O is fast enough to keep up, there will be no performance improvement (and if it isn't fast enough, things will come to a grinding halt.) The primary reason for fast drives was to keep the margin of audio I/O performance above the breaking point, and throwing RAM buffers at the problem is vastly more cost effective (and has vastly larger performance benefits.) If you read 10x more data per read, your seek count drops 90%, and that's where the performance penalty is, and the amount of additional RAM is in the noise (less than 1% of what most people run in their machines these days.)

Samplers push the envelope considerably, but read-ahead and cacheing can solve these problems for everything other than live performance.

Spending too much money on disk drives is going the same way that spending too much on outboard DSP hardware is going, happily.

DAW are reading and writing streams of data all the time. You load up on RAM so you can cut down on virtual memory access that saves on some disk I/O but your buffers don't hold that much so drives are streaming away.

[dkatz42]

Originally Posted by docbop

DAW are reading and writing streams of data all the time. You load up on RAM so you can cut down on virtual memory access that saves on some disk I/O but your buffers don't hold that much so drives are streaming away.

I think that's what I said. The point is that those streams aren't particularly taxing if buffers are done properly.

[loujudson]

Not needed for audio. Get a Seagate with the five year warranty. Eventually you'll be glad you did!

L

[Altitude909]

Originally Posted by loujudson

Not needed for audio. Get a Seagate with the five year warranty. Eventually you'll be glad you did!

L

WD raptors have a five year warrenty also. Never need to use mine on the 4 that I run though.. (and it is about seek times btw)

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by Altitude909

WD raptors have a five year warrenty also. Never need to use mine on the 4 that I run though.. (and it is about seek times btw)

Different strokes... I only use Seagates, 14 years no failures, except one WD and one Maxtor I once got... Just my preference, as they run quieter for me too.

L

[Jay-]

I'm still happy with two 36 gb raptors in raid striped.
Hour long videos in avid and nuendo barley show any activity.


Plus im cheap and these cost me $300 (yes I got them day one new) and still in service!

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by Jay-

Plus im cheap and these cost me $300 (yes I got them day one new) and still in service!

Amazing, since now you can get 500 GB for $70...

L

[Dopamine]

Isn't this overkill for audio? I'm still rockin' a 4 yr old ATA drive for Protools and have never had a problem. (Yes, I have everything backed up.)

[Jay-]

Originally Posted by loujudson

Amazing, since now you can get 500 GB for $70...

L

No such thing as 500gb raptors.

[loujudson]

Originally Posted by Jay-

No such thing as 500gb raptors.

Exactly my point...

But I use G4 Macs and ATA100 only (50 or so drives full of backups), so I'll bow out of this irrelevant (to me) discussion.

L

[Night Stalker]

running intel mac quad 2.66. I am getting the eat west composers complete ( 130 gig of sounds ) and thought a drive with these specs would be great but i read somewhere they are not compatible with mac pros?

thanks,

[Jay-]

Im in the same boat, huge post audio rig.
I went with the Seagate 7200.11 deal for 2 TB.


For orchastra though I still use the K2000r orchastral rom lol.

[esaias]

I did some dust-cleaning (and tried to kill some HD resonances) to my Mac Pro yesterday and I noticed that it could be possible to mount a VelociRaptor to Mac Pro with some McGyverism. The Mac Pro's SATA connector is just a connector mounted with screws on the chassis, there is no real "back plane". I guess you could unscrew the connector and connect it to Velociraptor. Ofcourse this is all just guessing since I don't have Velociraptor disk, but I'd REALLY like to upgrade my old noisy 250gb stock system drive to something faster. Anyways, just pull out one of Mac Pro's HD bays, take a peek in there and cue the McGyver thememusic :P

edit:
oh I totally forgot one thing: there should be 2 unused SATA connectors on the Mac Pro motherboard so you should be able to mount the Velociraptor into to the second optical drive bay.
(but this option does not include McGyverism, which is the fun part)


EDITDIETTIDETIED: Ho ho! I just had this why-didn't-I-think-of-this-before-moment. There are 4x 2.5" to 5.25" bay backplanes. So, in theory with some creative cable pulls, you could install 4 Velociraptors into Mac Pro, and if there was a Mac compatible PCIe sata controller you could install 4x 3.2" drives an 4x 2.5" ór maybe have 4x SAS with appropriate controller. hey ho got to drink more coffee :D

-Tomi

[allencollins]

Originally Posted by jcschild

once again you couldnt be more wrong..

1) SCSI has no place in pro audio anymore and hasnt for 4-5 yrs. and now has no place in video editing either.
SCSI/FC is only good for Corporate high tracactional low seak time needs.

take a look at all the high end external storage for video they are ALL Sata or at best SAS (which is sata) (Sonnet, Gtech, Avid etc)

2) SAS (serial attached SCSI) is SATA so much for you botlleneck comment.
3) SAS and FC and nearly indentical in speed.
3b) SAta and Sas are not that differnet in speed (lower seak times is the big benefit to SAS)
4) the WD Velociraptor is beating most SCSI drives even at the seak times.
5) drop $300 hmmm lets think about that
A) a good scsi controller is $300 add to that a SCSI drive which is tiny, hot, loud
now we are up to $600
B) you just lost a valueable PCI/PCIe slot to a useless SCSI drive.

i would recommend not posting unless you have the facts. wouldnt want to steer someone wrong would you?

Scott
ADK

Two words...... 'Bus Mastering' Read up on it. And be enlightened!