trying Raptor HDD WD1500ADFD on a Dell Precision 670

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bravegag

Hi all,

I was really eager to see how much the performance of my rig would
increase by replacing the DELL OEM Seagate Barracuda 80GB with
the newest "king of the hill" Raptor HDD WD1500ADFD.

My expectations were very high after reading Tom's Hardware
and they were unfortunately and indeed not fulfilled. I can
barely tell any performance increase not in XP startup nor in
running any applications like 3DMark2005 where in fact only
got about a 100 score increase, unnoticeable during the
replay anyway.

Not to mention I had to spend approx. 320USD for the new drive and
get no atonishing results at all, while I could have gotten a very
nice Seagate Barracuda with triple the size for about the
same money :(

I have bid on ebay for a couple of FUJITSU 36GB 15Krpm to put
them in RAID 0 along with my OEM FUJITSU 36GB 10Krpm using
the Adaptec HostRAID built in the Precision 670, so three altogether
and will make that my primary partition to see how it goes ... hmm or
probably I should use the money instead for holidays in Spain :P what
do you think?

Regards,
Me
 
Hi all,

I was really eager to see how much the performance of my rig would
increase by replacing the DELL OEM Seagate Barracuda 80GB with
the newest "king of the hill" Raptor HDD WD1500ADFD.

My expectations were very high after reading Tom's Hardware
and they were unfortunately and indeed not fulfilled. I can
barely tell any performance increase not in XP startup nor in
running any applications like 3DMark2005 where in fact only
got about a 100 score increase, unnoticeable during the
replay anyway.
Click to expand...

These are not scenarios where you should expect much
difference, rather than uses where the HDD is being accessed
such as app load times (the first time, before cached into
memory). It should help to load game levels too, on games
comprised of thousands of small files instead of a few
larger ones decompressed on the fly.

Not to mention I had to spend approx. 320USD for the new drive and
get no atonishing results at all, while I could have gotten a very
nice Seagate Barracuda with triple the size for about the
same money :(
Click to expand...

Some people prefer to have the high RPM and low latency
drive for their OS then a second larger drive in the system
as well.

Something to look at now, is if the HDD performance
potential had increased but overall it's not noticable, you
may have another system problem, or at least bottleneck that
needs resolved to get the benefit... same situation as with
any other kind of hardware upgrade.

I have bid on ebay for a couple of FUJITSU 36GB 15Krpm to put
them in RAID 0 along with my OEM FUJITSU 36GB 10Krpm using
the Adaptec HostRAID built in the Precision 670, so three altogether
and will make that my primary partition to see how it goes ... hmm or
probably I should use the money instead for holidays in Spain :P what
do you think?

Regards,
Me
Click to expand...


I think you need to more carefully target where you need the
performance gain. If it's in 3DMark2005, consider a new
video card or possibly the CPU (since we have no idea what
the rest of your system is like). I don't think I'd cancel
a vacation just to get a little faster HDDs, but it's not my
decision to make.
 
bravegag said:
Hi all,

I was really eager to see how much the performance of my rig would
increase by replacing the DELL OEM Seagate Barracuda 80GB with
the newest "king of the hill" Raptor HDD WD1500ADFD.

My expectations were very high after reading Tom's Hardware
and they were unfortunately and indeed not fulfilled. I can
barely tell any performance increase not in XP startup nor in
running any applications like 3DMark2005 where in fact only
got about a 100 score increase, unnoticeable during the
replay anyway.

Not to mention I had to spend approx. 320USD for the new drive and
get no atonishing results at all, while I could have gotten a very
nice Seagate Barracuda with triple the size for about the
same money :(

I have bid on ebay for a couple of FUJITSU 36GB 15Krpm to put
them in RAID 0 along with my OEM FUJITSU 36GB 10Krpm using
the Adaptec HostRAID built in the Precision 670, so three altogether
and will make that my primary partition to see how it goes ... hmm or
probably I should use the money instead for holidays in Spain :P what
do you think?

Regards,
Me
Click to expand...

I think one way you'd see a difference, is if you search for files
on each of the drives. The file search dialog should complete a
lot faster for the Raptor, than for your older 7200 RPM drive.
The file search is an example of random access, so the head does
more flying around, than the file system does reading. Of course,
once you've searched the disk from end to end once, Windows has
probably cached the info for the next time you search. So the
benefit would tend to be more for the first time you search.

Another scenario where you might see a benefit, is if you are
a software developer, and you do your builds on the Raptor. Compiles
look for a lot of small header files, which has a more or less
random aspect to disk head movement. The Raptor should allow your
software builds to go faster.

Sustained transfer rate will be faster as well, and if you use
a stopwatch, and time how long it takes to transfer a 1GB file
from one partition to another on the Raptor, that should be
faster than transferring a 1GB file between two partitions on the
old drive.

For a lot of other stuff, you may be sorely disappointed.

So think carefully about the kinds of things that you wish
to speed up, before spending a slug of money that won't give
anything in return. If you are all the time moving a lot of
large files around, or you have an application with a serious
random access pattern, then spending money on a RAID, or
on faster RPM drives, might make sense.

3DMark benchmarks your video card and CPU and their abilities.
It should not be testing the disk drive - I would be disappointed
if it did :-) The most useful benchmarks are the ones that
concentrate on one aspect of usage, as they allow you to find
bottlenecks easier.

Paul
 
From what I've seen in the past, A Raptor 74 was faster than an average IDE
HD with 16meg cache (7200rpm). but a SCSI Ultra 160 HD 10k rpm was
noticeably faster than the Raptor in various benchmarks as well as in Adobe
Photoshop.

So, it depends on what you're comparing a Raptor to. If you're expecting a
Raptor (even the 150 I suspect) to be noticably faster than a Ultra 160 or
320 SCSI drive, you will be disspointed.
 
Hi all,

Many thanks for your responses!

Actually the Raptor WD1500ADFD outperforms by far my FUJITSU SCSI 10K
36GB. I got really good information in Sis Sandra report explaining
that the Raptor "mode of operation was not optimal" I have to check the
SATA settings on my chipset or the drive jumpers settings.

Any ideas where to get the latest version of the Intel SATA built in
controller? the version I got in my Precision 670 is dated 2001!!!

Thanks in advance,
Best Regards,
Me
 
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