# Anyone know if Velociraptors will come in smaller (in terms of GB) sizes?



## KBD (May 29, 2008)

I want to get a couple of these for RAID 0, but 300GB is too much for me (not to mention pricey). Anyone know if they will come in 150, 74, 36 or any other size less than 300?


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

It's possible but I would doubt it considering their target.
It's getting harder and harder to find smaller drives, and with a price point its even harder.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> It's possible but I would doubt it considering their target.
> It's getting harder and harder to find smaller drives, and with a price point its even harder.



Considering their target? Their target is exactly the thing that doesn't require massive storage. Mostly fast Windows bootdisks and the likes. ie most people can doe fine with 36/72GB. For data storage nobody requires the low access times.


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## xmountainxlionx (May 29, 2008)

it would be awsome if you could stuff one of those things in a lappy


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## FR@NK (May 29, 2008)

xmountainxlionx said:


> it would be awsome if you could stuff one of those things in a lappy



You easily could. They use the same 2.5in SATA connection on notebooks....only problem would be battery life. SSD would be better for a notebook IMO.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Considering their target? Their target is exactly the thing that doesn't require massive storage. Mostly fast Windows bootdisks and the likes. ie most people can doe fine with 36/72GB. For data storage nobody requires the low access times.



It's not all about fast boot times, really 10ks don't help "that" much in boot time.....

How about people that can afford them for business, live recording and such, backup servers for people that don't want to fork money for scsi.

Cost difference for the build from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive is next to nothing, you pay a lot of extra money for a little more money they put into it, now obviously there are lines there where the cost to build goes way up also.

But all in all considering that hard drives in everyday machines are 400-500-600gb these days..

I could see something a little smaller, maybe a 250/200, but I doubt we will see a 36/74 and probably not a 150. We will have to wait and see though.


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## KBD (May 29, 2008)

too bad no one knows anything about my question. Ideally i want 2 36GB 16 MB Cache Veloci but it doesn't seem likely to me either.


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## FR@NK (May 29, 2008)

KBD said:


> too bad no one knows anything about my question. Ideally i want 2 36GB 16 MB Cache Veloci but it doesn't seem likely to me either.



Niko answered your question.....



niko084 said:


> Cost difference for the build from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive is next to nothing, you pay a lot of extra money for a little more money they put into it, now obviously there are lines there where the cost to build goes way up also.
> 
> I could see something a little smaller, maybe a 250/200, but I doubt we will see a 36/74 and probably not a 150. We will have to wait and see though.



Its like you're asking for a 800MHz Core 2 Quad......Its not cost effective to make one.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

Well I didn't really answer it because I don't know.
But I can say I don't think they will make them too small because of cost/price.


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## panchoman (May 29, 2008)

my guess is no cause they use 334 gb platters so in order to do smaller sizes they'd have to lock some space (but that could be hacked so thats a bad idea) or use different platters (might deter performance, etc.)


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## KBD (May 29, 2008)

Exactly, niko only speculated that it is unlikely that they will make anything smaller but no one knows anything at this point. Though what he is saying makes sense.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> It's not all about fast boot times, really 10ks don't help "that" much in boot time.....
> 
> How about people that can afford them for business, live recording and such, backup servers for people that don't want to fork money for scsi.


Data throughput hardly is higher than with 7200 RPM disks. So I'm not sure how live recording, be it video or audio, will see any gain. What exactly do you call a backup server? If you mean data, it's more cost efficient to just have a RAID 1/5 array of large 7200RPM disks. The Raptors offer no value there.

Access times are really the key factor with Raptors, which helps with a boot disks. Which doesn't translate into just boot times.



niko084 said:


> Cost difference for the build from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive is next to nothing, you pay a lot of extra money for a little more money they put into it, now obviously there are lines there where the cost to build goes way up also.


Yes, that's because 80GB is ancient and hardly produced anymore, if at all. Besides, you can't compare normal desktop drives to enterprise class drives or in this case the Raptors which fill a gap in between. Specially not price wise.



niko084 said:


> But all in all considering that hard drives in everyday machines are 400-500-600gb these days..


Standard desktop drives again, yes.


niko084 said:


> I could see something a little smaller, maybe a 250/200, but I doubt we will see a 36/74 and probably not a 150. We will have to wait and see though.



From 300 to 250/200, how would the platters be configured then? three 100GB platters? Doubt it. Either way 250 is impossible unless there is another platter size used, which would be rather pointless.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

panchoman said:


> my guess is no cause they use 334 gb platters so in order to do smaller sizes they'd have to lock some space (but that could be hacked so thats a bad idea) or use different platters (might deter performance, etc.)



Care to name a previous model where you can unlock space?



FR@NK said:


> Its like you're asking for a 800MHz Core 2 Quad......Its not cost effective to make one.



Why exactly is that? they make 50W quads at 2.33GHz, so at 800MHz they can go as low as ~20W, quite a nice passive chip you got there then. Think blades and embedded systems.


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## sttubs (May 29, 2008)

KBD said:


> I want to get a couple of these for RAID 0, but 300GB is too much for me (not to mention pricey). Anyone know if they will come in 150, 74, 36 or any other size less than 300?



Yes, they are going to be making a 150gb version, according their site: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/2178-001010.pdf


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## austinrider (May 29, 2008)

I am super weary to even consider this drive due to the 2.5" form factor.  Over the past years I've had several laptop(2.5") drives go out.  Believe it's from heat and the small package it comes in.  The 3.5" drives have far less of a failure rate.  I currently run a 74gig(3.5") raptor and it's great.  Get a bit hotter and is louder than a 7.2k RPM drive.


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## KBD (May 29, 2008)

sttubs said:


> Yes, they are going to be making a 150gb version, according their site: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/2178-001010.pdf



Nice find, thnx


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

austinrider said:


> I am super weary to even consider this drive due to the 2.5" form factor.  Over the past years I've had several laptop(2.5") drives go out.  Believe it's from heat and the small package it comes in.  The 3.5" drives have far less of a failure rate.  I currently run a 74gig(3.5") raptor and it's great.  Get a bit hotter and is louder than a 7.2k RPM drive.



Savvios work fine, why wouldn't these?


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## austinrider (May 29, 2008)

Maybe I shouldn't jump to a conclusion with the WD's.  All the dead one's I have are IBM and Hitachi.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

Live recording requires low access times, and I honestly doubt the new sata2 10ks will be "slightly" faster than a standard 7200rpm drive, considering the sata1 10ks keep up with them pretty well out of burst speeds.

10k's in a raid with a hardware controller are also really fast!


Nice to see some 150's, might be interested in a few of those myself, see how they perform and holdup, I think they should hold up better with the smaller diameter platters and more heatsink area.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Savvios work fine, why wouldn't these?



On top of that, they are in a larger casing and are built for regular cases, they will cool much better and probably weight a bit more, probably better parts all together.

Notebook drives are not built the same, but this could simply be a 2.5" drive carrige for smaller platters and more heatsink.


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## Castiel (May 29, 2008)

Okay I have 2 of them and there awesome.
Now I heard that they are making Raptors that are going to be in notebooks.
But I don't think they will come out with smaller ones. If you want smaller, just get some original Raptors that are 150's.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> On top of that, they are in a larger casing and are built for regular cases, they will cool much better and probably weight a bit more, probably better parts all together.
> 
> Notebook drives are not built the same, but this could simply be a 2.5" drive carrige for smaller platters and more heatsink.



Notebook drives are made for mobile usage. Besides, I haven't seen that many fail. I had one fail last month, it had a big dent in the cover though, might be related. Other than that I haven't seen that many fail. I see other parts of laptops fail a lot more.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> Live recording requires low access times, and I honestly doubt the new sata2 10ks will be "slightly" faster than a standard 7200rpm drive, considering the sata1 10ks keep up with them pretty well out of burst speeds.
> 
> 10k's in a raid with a hardware controller are also really fast!
> 
> ...



SATA2 offers nothing but higher burst speeds. Why would live recording require low access times? It's a constant stream of data. Have some test that shows otherwise? They're not random reads/writes.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> SATA2 offers nothing but higher burst speeds. Why would live recording require low access times? It's a constant stream of data. Have some test that shows otherwise? They're not random reads/writes.



Live recording of music and monitoring you want as low of a latency as you can possibly get, especially when you are loading many files and laying them over other files while recording. Its more really for digitaly produced music then band recording.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Notebook drives are made for mobile usage. Besides, I haven't seen that many fail. I had one fail last month, it had a big dent in the cover though, might be related. Other than that I haven't seen that many fail. I see other parts of laptops fail a lot more.



I get between 2-5 a week with dead drives, and maybe 1 dead desktop drive a week... I think the main problem is people using notebooks like desktops never turning them off and always on them, laid on carpet where they can't cool very well etc.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> I get between 2-5 a week with dead drives, and maybe 1 dead desktop drive a week... I think the main problem is people using notebooks like desktops never turning them off and always on them, laid on carpet where they can't cool very well etc.



Which means nothing without the context.


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## Deleted member 3 (May 29, 2008)

niko084 said:


> Live recording of music and monitoring you want as low of a latency as you can possibly get, especially when you are loading many files and laying them over other files while recording. Its more really for digitaly produced music then band recording.



Well if there are many tracks I can imagine that you're right. Though I highly doubt many people here would do enough for it to matter. Of course it also depends on the format, if it's all uncompressed data requirements go up rapidly.


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## niko084 (May 29, 2008)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Well if there are many tracks I can imagine that you're right. Though I highly doubt many people here would do enough for it to matter. Of course it also depends on the format, if it's all uncompressed data requirements go up rapidly.



No also very true, I'm not arguing the usefullness or lack of usefullness of them, I just can't imagine them being able to sell enough 36-74gb drives to justify the cost of making them.

Until I read it further, I was under the impression these were the same enterprise drives brought to sata2 level and higher capacity, in which case size means a lot because they land themselves in lots of servers.


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