Temperature and Noise

I believe that everyone or almost everyone have already put up with the fact that WD hard disk drives do not support temperature monitoring in SMART. However, I decided to check this feature by WD360GD just in case and was pleasantly surprised to find out that my favorite DTemp reported success.

Having started the “warm-up” test I started watching the temperature very closely. The monitor indicated 43 and this number remained unchanged for an hour. After that I checked the HDD all over with the infra-red thermometer trying to detect high temperature zones and here is what I got in the end:

If this value displayed in the SMART register is a real temperature and not a trick of WD software guys, then this spot should be located somewhere around HDD mechanism.

As for the noise WD Raptor produces, I also have some great news for you: Raptor is not the noisiest HDD I have ever heard. The spindle produces just a tiny bit more noise than any regular 7,200rpm HDD. The heads are traditional WD heads, which means that they are very quiet and non-irritating. The only moment when you may feel not very happy with the way it sounds is the motor start. As Raptor drive is ready to work after 7 seconds already, it is very active during these 7 seconds. But anyway, you will get used to this sound very quickly, this is not a GeForce FX :) I am saying this from my personal experience, as I installed a WD Raptor and a GeForce FX card in one PC case.

Conclusion

Well, the trip to 10,000rpm started quite successfully for WD. WD Raptor drive appeared a very exciting product. Fast mechanics and excellent lazy write algorithms allowed it to star quite a bit in our tests. Sometimes, it even defeated SCSI solutions, which is not a trifle.

However, the actual numbers obtained during the tests indicate that WD360GD features a very big piece of desktop genotype. No command tag queuing support and a Marvel converter will prevent it from competing successfully with 10,000rpm SCSI drives. WD360GD is very powerful under linear workload, but as the load grows up, the performance gap between the newcomer and the SCSI drives increases quite a lot.

As for Raptor’s future in the server market, it looks quite vague to me still. Until the server cases with native SATA drives support come (i.e. with the corresponding backplane or hotswap racks) I wouldn’t count on high sales. On the other hand, someone should be the first anyway...

An additional argument in favor of this SATA 10,000rpm drive could be its large storage capacity, such as 146GB, for instance. In this case the price difference between a SATA and a SCSI drive could be quite attractive for many users. But in the meanwhile there is only one Raptor: 36GB.

Another niche where WD wants to promote its solution is high-performance workstations. And we should admit that this field is a very good application for Raptor. High data density, fast response time and advanced lazy write algorithms make this HDD the only good choice for a high-performance workstation.

And it is also very remarkable that you will have to pay not too much for this speed, because if you were planning to get a SCSI, you would have to spend another $150 for a SCSI controller, while all contemporary mainboards feature an integrated SATA controller chip, which also supports RAID functions. Well, if I were you I would spend this $150 extra for another Raptor and enjoy the higher reliability (with RAID 1).