What is Digg?76 Comments
- jaybol, on 06/27/2008, -1/+39i want to see one get loose and eat Jeff Goldblum
- ExSlashdotter, on 06/28/2008, -4/+32Well you're sure as hell not running a RAID 5 with two disks...
Three disks is the least amount of drives that you need for a spanned volume that allows you to maintain uptime in the case of a failure.
Are 5 drives 'better' than 3? I suppose. But that doesnt mean a 3-drive raid5 config isnt useful in certain situations. I dont really see your point.
(btw, i'm just a network admin for a $16B company) - Firehed, on 06/28/2008, -0/+27What on earth are you talking about? A three-disk RAID5 array allows a single drive failure, gives you a speed increase over a single drive (though not quite as much as RAID0), doesn't lose 50% of the space like RAID1, and has a relatively low entry cost. Not everyone needs a hot spare, and the other benefits scale with the number of drives.
- vault, on 06/27/2008, -4/+26Any Mac Pro users thinking about installing a velociraptor, the sata and power connectors are not in the same spot as a standard 3.5" drive, so they don't line up with the Mac Pro's sleds...you need to do this to get it to work: http://www.barefeats.com/hard103.html scroll down to 'tricky install'
- claycollins, on 06/27/2008, -2/+17I want one.
- smurfz, on 06/27/2008, -4/+15I need one.
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/28/2008, -0/+10HH's single drive full review is here:
http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Western_Digita ...
Still killer fast... - Y0tsuya, on 06/28/2008, -1/+9Oops, no fault tolerance.
- incircolo, on 06/27/2008, -3/+11thanks for the review, i have never tested VelociRaptors hard drives
- EarlOfLade, on 06/28/2008, -12/+19RAID 5 with 3 disks? What are these people? Plumbers?
With 3 disks, you have a gutted RAID 5 that is really not useful for anything, not even a benchmark. Nobody runs a RAID 5 with 3 disks. - vault, on 06/28/2008, -0/+7Well if it were truly demanding you'd probably use scsi to begin with. I see raptors as being mostly for gamers, a/v workstations, enthusiast/power users, etc.
They probably will come out with a new version though...I was reading a while ago transintl is coming out with a bracket to work around this anyway. - tmalloy, on 06/28/2008, -1/+8What do you mean "not two but three WD VelociRaptor drives in a RAID 5 configuration"? You can't have RAID 5 with two drives.
- megamod, on 06/28/2008, -1/+7"It was with a few of these questions in mind that we decided to RAID up not two but three WD VelociRaptor drives in a RAID 5"
I can't believe they were even considering doing RAID 5 on JUST 2 hard drives. That would basically be like doing Raid 1. It would be nice to see them doing that test with 4 or 5 hard drives to see how much of a performance gain you can get by adding more hard drives. - digitalarcanum, on 06/28/2008, -0/+6it's pretty obvious you've never worked in a datacenter before, huh? anything with three drives or more is set up with RAID 5. all other servers usually have a minimum of two drives and are set up in RAID 1. So what if you can't squeeze out that extra 10MB/s read performance or .1ms seek time. You've got fault tolerance and that's what's important in a business environment.
- sega01, on 06/27/2008, -1/+7I would have liked to see an individual drive's performance, but raid 5 or not, they are fast drives.
- KibibyteBrain, on 06/28/2008, -1/+7Enterprise with their money would opt for more, more reliable server grade drives in RAID 10 for a performance solution. RAID 5 is usually used for economy, not performance. To be quite frank, I don't even understand where this article is coming from using fast drives in RAID 5 to try to boost performance over other more effective and reliable methods. For a few home user geeks, this might have usefulness, but nowhere else I can foresee. Performance-oriented apps aren't going to want to crunch parity xors and everyone else would prefer cheaper drives for more/larger drives at the same cost.
- cgreentx, on 06/28/2008, -0/+6Clearly you miss the point of RAID 5. If performance was primary goal you would run 10 or 50. RAID 5 is about maximum space with redundancy.
- SVOboy, on 06/28/2008, -3/+8RAID!?!?!?!? /end scared bug noise
- inactive, on 06/28/2008, -1/+6@Hortnon
Im pretty sure separating everything onto different drives completely negates any benefits of recoverability that RAID 5 has to offer. - ExSlashdotter, on 06/28/2008, -0/+4i wasnt talking about 'gaming machines' in my comment. i'm talking about for systems that would require the continuous uptime provided by raid5.
if you're going to build a server out of a regular PC, most of them only have room for 4 sata or ide devices anyway. one for your OS, the other 3 in a raid5.
raid5 doesnt care about speed. its also not a substitute for a backup regiment. it just affords you constant uptime in the event of a drive failure. - kitsua, on 06/28/2008, -0/+3How loud is it though?
I already have two Raptors in my machine alongside two Barracudas and even with a special padded case, a silent PSU and a Zalman fan the noise is still too high for my home studio setup. The extra speed is always nice if you're streaming lots of audio tracks and samples with realtime edits and processing but if it's super noisy it wouldn't be worth it in my case. - inactive, on 06/27/2008, -3/+6helpful! I've never used them before...
- Jenadae, on 06/28/2008, -0/+3http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85rcd5hq2ds&feature ...
- inactive, on 06/28/2008, -0/+3Raid 5 with three disks is useful in server environments for redundancy. It is useful to have that type of set up so that if a drive goes out you can replace it and rebuild the array without putting your entire company out of work for the time it would take to rebuild a server from bare metal. Not all servers need huge amounts of storage. Exchange server, for instance, has built in limitations on how large the databases may become, and putting that database on a big huge drive is a waste of space. Speed isn't usually limited on a network by the speed of the platters on the drives, so it's not an issue either. Someday you kids will learn that there are people that do real work with computers, not just games. Until then, go back to your mommy's basement and play WoW.
Signed: I'm not a plumber and you are an elitist that really knows jack ***** about computers. - Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/28/2008, -0/+3They are actually dead silent. Seriously, quieter than most standard 7200 RPM drives that I've heard.
- luther70, on 06/28/2008, -1/+4Unless you are tuning for a Database server you don't give a rats ass about a slight improvement in performance. You care about having to replace a drive at 2 AM on a Sunday morning. If you have the budget you are not using internal storage anyways. You're boot and Data drives are on SAN.
- ThinkBox, on 06/28/2008, -1/+4Awesome!
Wait,.... this is on Digg?
What is it, 2005?
Good Tech news on Digg?? NANI NANI? - veruus, on 06/28/2008, -0/+2Well, it's a good thing they didn't try RAID5 with one or two disks, isn't it? For the next round of testing, try RAID0 w/ 4 or 5 of those bad boys.
- Morshade, on 06/27/2008, -3/+5nice rev
- Hortnon, on 06/28/2008, -0/+2You've got other issues if it takes you 2 minutes to boot Vista...
- wiggimt, on 06/28/2008, -1/+3I think you missed the point that RAID5 is naturally slower than RAID0. You aren't having to calculate parity blocks with RAID0, hence (relative) superior performance.
- secleinteer, on 06/28/2008, -1/+3Bb bbb bbut it's a Mac! It's just supposed to work!
- Muncher, on 06/28/2008, -0/+2Wasteful, sure. But it’s fast, all right.
- kitsua, on 06/28/2008, -0/+2Really? That's interesting.
Thanks chum. - Hortnon, on 06/28/2008, -2/+4@vault
Fibre Channel SAS > * :)
@kibibytebrain
Exactly what I was thinking. I've analyzed many systems that have used RAID 5 exclusively, all together, for Oracle databases, then whined about performance being bad. Well, that's because RAID 5 works *to a degree* for performance, and that's for reads, not writes. Then you add in journaling which can bring an entire array to its knees. It's far better to go with multiple independant RAID 10 configurations to physically separate data and IO operations. The downside is that your 1.5 TB raw just turned to 750 GB usable...But it'll be far faster and recover from failure better. - Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/27/2008, -2/+3Great info, thanks!
- coolchu001, on 06/28/2008, -1/+2I'm not bragging, I'm comparing as to how wasteful it is to have 3 raptors and yet 2 640GB get close to the same performance and with 3 640GB it gets more than what these raptors can get and can also do Raid 5
- Y0tsuya, on 06/28/2008, -2/+3A 3 drive RAID5 doesn't really exercise anything. Lots of people use RAID5 with over 10 drives. Benchmarks with that type of setup is more useful than that pipsqueak in the article.
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1ahahahah!!! That's some funny stuff...
- Jaliyl, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1I have 2 old 36GB raptors in raid0 and vista never takes that long.
- Muncher, on 06/28/2008, -1/+2I find it amusing how you’re bragging about your RAID 0 setup, despite it being slower than these VelociRaptors in RAID 5. And then concluding that they’re “not even fast.”
- jasonh1234, on 07/02/2008, -0/+1just one?
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1HD Tach showed Average Burst of 598. HDTune showed lower. Look again...
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1@Inorganic You're right, currently these new drives do not have an industry standard connector layout. They won't fit in a 2.5" sled for a standard hot-swap chassis config but I've heard WD is planning on coming out with a new model that will offer a standard (3.5" presumably) connector layout. These current models are really for enthusiast desktop/workstation types.
- virtualball, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1What, no mention of xkcd yet?!?‽‽!!!oneone!!!interrobang‽
- exabytes16, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1Failure. I intended to say that the burst and average are lower in the article.
- exabytes16, on 06/28/2008, -0/+1Mmmm, why are the burst and average stated in the article lower than the screenshot? I suppose it was hitting the cache if they did actually realize 598MB/sec since that's absurdly high.
- jasonh1234, on 07/02/2008, -0/+1So who wants to try one of these in a laptop without the heatsink? :-)
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