Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 7, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
The importance of this review, the reviews to come and our new HDD test suite in general is that we are finally able to bring real world hard drive performance numbers to you all. So, what do our real world performance tests show us?
They show us that, for the most part, all of the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives perform about the same. Although there are much more significant differences between the three current-gen contenders here in the synthetic tests, in the real world, we see that they all perform just about the same.
Our tests have also shown us that the 10,000RPM Raptor can offer a noticeable, but not dramatic, performance improvement over the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. While the performance improvement is there, it's not as significant as the synthetic tests would have you believe.
More importantly than all of this is the fact that our tests have shown the true age of older 2MB cache drives. The 75GXP, once the most popular drive around, is definitely showing its age and the performance of the even newer Maxtor D740X-6L isn't that far off. If you're still running an older drive, you will see a performance improvement by going to even one of the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. It is all too often that we look at hard drives as capacities alone, but while a 80GB drive may be suiting your needs just fine an upgrade to a newer 120+ GB drive will give you more space and a performance boost to match. The thing to keep in mind is that the more up-to-date you keep your hard drive performance, the faster your system will feel and the more performance you'll get out of every upgrade of your CPU, motherboard, chipset, etc.
With our new test suite, we are committed to bringing you reviews of any drive that's available. All we ask is that you give us feedback. If you'd like to see a drive reviewed, let us know and we'll do our best to get it reviewed under the new test suite. We're going to be focusing on IDE/SATA drives first, but we will definitely move to include SCSI drives as well as controllers in the very near future. All you need to do is drop us a line and tell us what you'd like to see.
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MikhailT - Wednesday, June 9, 2004 - link
For a gamer, it would be a better idea to get a single 74gb raptor instead of raid0 with 2x36 raptors. I don't think there will be any difference between both situation. Raid0 might have data failure issue over long term no?ElFenix - Wednesday, June 9, 2004 - link
I'd like to see the SATA version of the 7200.7 myself, SR generally feels that the SATA version is somewhat faster than the PATA version.Also, about the Hitachis... they tend to 'meow' at you every once in a while... supposedly that increases their reliability, but when i'm going for silence it isn't wanted. When silence is key i'll go with the ultra-quiet, reliable, non-meowing, still fast, and dirt cheap ($0.35/gig) 7200.7
T8000 - Tuesday, June 8, 2004 - link
#36, it is nice to know you did get a performance boost, but I would like to ask what drive you had before and if you bought the 74 GB Raptor.This is important, because there is a large performance difference between the latest 7200 RPM drives and the early sub 20 GB ones.
Also, SCSI drives are famous for their loud whining noise, so a lot of people I heard would not even use a SCSI drive if it would be free, unless they become more silent, so this may be a good reason why SCSI drives are not used much in workstations.
Tostada - Tuesday, June 8, 2004 - link
The SATA Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 (which has 8MB cache and a 3-year warranty) is generally cheaper, faster, and quieter than every comparable drive. Well, the Samsung is a little quieter. The Hitachi 7K250 is about as fast as a Raptor 36G, though. In my experience, the only practical drives to buy these days are:Samsung for ATA
Hitachi 7K250 for SATA
Raptor 740GD for SATA if you want the absolute best performance.
Look at NewEgg's current price of the Hitachi 7K250 SATA line with 8MB cache and 3-year warranty:
80GB = $74.00 delivered
160GB = $103.50 delivered
250GB = $194.00 delivered
Raptor 740GD = $200.00 delivered
The Raptor 740GD is 25% faster in some situations. Still, in most systems I would prefer to spend $200 for a RAID of two 160GB Hitachi's instead of a single 74GB Raptor.
I see many people still recommending WD's non-Raptor drives, which just don't keep up. Here's some stats from StorageReview.
High-End DriveMark 2002:
Raptor 740GD: 585 IO/sec
Raptor 360GD: 467 IO/sec
Hitachi 7K250: 442 IO/sec
WD800JB: 375 IO/sec
StorageReview Gaming DriveMark 2002:
Raptor 740GD: 749 IO/sec
Raptor 360GD: 588 IO/sec
Hitachi 7K250: 588 IO/sec
WD800JB: 477 IO/sec
WB99 Max Read Transfer Rate:
Raptor 740GD: 71.8 MB/sec
Raptor 360GD: 57.4 MB/sec
Hitachi 7K250: 60.4 MB/sec
WD800JB: 49.3 MB/sec
Idle Noise:
Raptor 740GD: 42.3 dB/A
Raptor 360GD: 43.1 dB/A
Hitachi 7K250: 41.5 dB/A
WD800JB: 45.0 dB/A
tmhartsr - Tuesday, June 8, 2004 - link
Recently upgraded my primary desktop to Raptor 10K. Actual improvement in everyday system performance and quickness is very noticable! An excellent practical measure of disk performance is writing/restoring a Ghost Image between two of these various drives. The difference is strikingly clear in this real world measure. I think disk performance has been much overlooked recently and deserves much more attention. Also that SCSI 320 should always be included in these comparisions. SCSI 320 is under-utilized in high end systems? Also what effect will new PCI Express boards have on HD performance and development?Kravahn - Tuesday, June 8, 2004 - link
A little clarification... I'm used to seeing frank recommendations on AnandTech, and this was more than ambiguous. It should have said... 'if you want the best performance possible, the latest Raptor is for you; with that in mind, nearly equivalent performance, and certainly more bang for the buck can be had with the current 8MB PATA iterations tested here.'Kravahn - Tuesday, June 8, 2004 - link
Another point regarding final analyses... a 10% increase in performance is definitely notable, but when that 10%increase relates to a 39 second vs. a 42 second load time, it becomes negligible. It seems silly to me to pay more money for less storage to save three seconds. The geek in me loves the numbers, but as a reseller it's hard for me to sell a product just because it's a little faster, especially when my customer would be sacrificing 50G of storage. I think the summary should include a bit of reality and not just factual conclusions.Mackintire - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
demonbug - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
First of all, great HD performance comparison - I just have a nitpick. My only comment is in regards to the game loading test. You must have one quick thumb on the stopwatch to measure down to the ten-thousandth of a second as you show on the graphs. I know, probably comes from averaging, but come on - round it to the nearest tenth, or hundredth at least (if you think you were really that quick with the stopwatch). Didn't they ever teach you about significant digits in school?GOSHARKS - Monday, June 7, 2004 - link
discussion regarding the article in the forums:http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=...
i have to say that the article really suprised me and the results are quite INTERESTING