WD 2Tb Caviar Black leaves Velociraptor in the dust
Posted: Sat Sep 19, 2009 7:00 am
Impressive. The technology that makes this work is WD has added a small little actuator on the end of the main actuator arm which allows for near instantaneous track seeks if the next track is within 5 tracks distance.
The problem is I don't necessarily want a fast AND large drive. I have up until now preferred a small (and thus more reliable) fast boot drive, and then a decent but not high performance large drive for my data, games and media.
Although the good thing is that if these 2Tb Caviar Blacks are priced at $300, that means they have to drop the prices on the Velociraptors A LOT. Doesn't make sense to sell a 300Gb Velociraptor for $229 when you can buy a 2Tb Caviar Black that outperforms it for $300
I'm still planning on getting a Velociraptor sometime late this year to replace my 74Gb Raptor boot drive when I upgrade to Window 7. That way I can keep the old drive handy with XP on it in case I need to switch back for some reason.
The one thing that may tempt me to go with one of these is that they are probably quieter than a Velociraptor since they sping at 7200 RPM instead of 10K. I'll have to research that.
I really can't see going SSD yet. Apart from the prices, from following the enthusiast tech sites it really sounds like SSD is still having too many teething pains at this stage. There are constantly issues with firmware because in an SSD you improve performance by tweaking the algorithms used to assign the order of memory locations used. Some drives are seeing a new firmware update every few weeks as they find scenarios where performance tanks because of a particular algorithm not being optimized for a particular type of use. Some drives - even high end ones - have been seeing dramatic performance loss after a few month use because of this.
This sounds like the early days of hard drives all over again where you would tweak your sector sizes to get the best performance for a given hard drive size, and have to run a sector scan and defrag regularly.
I have enough to worry about without having to tweak my hard drive all the time and update it's firmware every month. I'll wait until the tech matures a little more.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=775
The problem is I don't necessarily want a fast AND large drive. I have up until now preferred a small (and thus more reliable) fast boot drive, and then a decent but not high performance large drive for my data, games and media.
Although the good thing is that if these 2Tb Caviar Blacks are priced at $300, that means they have to drop the prices on the Velociraptors A LOT. Doesn't make sense to sell a 300Gb Velociraptor for $229 when you can buy a 2Tb Caviar Black that outperforms it for $300
I'm still planning on getting a Velociraptor sometime late this year to replace my 74Gb Raptor boot drive when I upgrade to Window 7. That way I can keep the old drive handy with XP on it in case I need to switch back for some reason.
The one thing that may tempt me to go with one of these is that they are probably quieter than a Velociraptor since they sping at 7200 RPM instead of 10K. I'll have to research that.
I really can't see going SSD yet. Apart from the prices, from following the enthusiast tech sites it really sounds like SSD is still having too many teething pains at this stage. There are constantly issues with firmware because in an SSD you improve performance by tweaking the algorithms used to assign the order of memory locations used. Some drives are seeing a new firmware update every few weeks as they find scenarios where performance tanks because of a particular algorithm not being optimized for a particular type of use. Some drives - even high end ones - have been seeing dramatic performance loss after a few month use because of this.
This sounds like the early days of hard drives all over again where you would tweak your sector sizes to get the best performance for a given hard drive size, and have to run a sector scan and defrag regularly.
I have enough to worry about without having to tweak my hard drive all the time and update it's firmware every month. I'll wait until the tech matures a little more.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=775