Monday, December 26th 2005
Western Digital Raptor 150GB SATA2 NCQ
Good Christmas news for WD Raptor fans. New Raptors with 150GB capacity are expected to be released. That's not a press release statement on the part of Western Digital Technologies but Germany-based online store Alternate.de is currently offering its clients to pre-order WD1500AD hard disk drive, also known as Raptor 150GB. The new Raptor drives have 16MB cache, average seek time of 4.5ms, 10 000rpm motor, support for native command queuing (NCQ) technology and also has SerialATA-300 interface and promises to offer leading performance. The new Raptor hard drive from WD will not only be an interesting purchase for gaming enthusiasts and workstation users, but will also be a valuable option for servers that require high performance. The new hard disk drive will be available in January, 2006. The price for pre-order is approximately $380 (€319).
Source:
X-bit
5 Comments on Western Digital Raptor 150GB SATA2 NCQ
I have two of the 74GB Raptors in Raid 0 and they're pretty fast. If the benchmarks on the new 150's is much faster than the 74's maybe I'll upgrade. Too bad they won't be 15K. That would be sweet.
10k drives are way to expensive for my taste already (200gb 7200RPM costs around 100€s, and a 150GB 10000RPM over 300€s?). Imagine what a 150GB S-ATA II drive with 15k kosts...I would guess around 500-600€ at least ey?...
But thats just my opinion here *G*.
cheers
DS
I think you have a lot of misconceptions about these drives. Maybe you should head on over to www.storagereview.com/ and educate yourself.
wtf8269, you will see a substantial increase in performance because the current raptors use an IDE to SATA adaptor and they are not true SATA. They also have an 8MB cache and no NCQ support. The new Raptor will have true SATA II 3.0GB/s hardware and a 16MB cache and NCQ support. When the first 36GB Raptor came out 3 years ago, it was MUCH faster than 7200RPM drives at the time. 7200RPM drives that have SATA II, 16MB caches, and NCQ now have almost caught up to the first generation raptors. Now with the new generation raptors getting all those features I think they will make another major leap. One 150 raptor will probably be a 25% increase over one 74 raptor. And yes, I would go Raid 0 even with the cost.
new hard drive -true sata II ncq 16mb cache raptors
new mobo- probably will go with the new amd scokets
new cpu 940 socket amd
new memory ddr3
new gpu ati or nividia g71 with ddr4
when all that hit the market i will be upgrading
oh yeah,
new os vista 64