WD Caviar SE16 640GB 16MB (WD6400AAKS) £70.49 inc VAT

[ChrisD.]

Mine is here. Only one of the two hooked up though as I can't find my SATA cables.

 

[rpstewart]

Well I've got the drives in and the benchmarks are disappointing, not due to the drives though. Single disk and 2 disk RAID0 benchmarks are similar to those above but for any bigger arrays the controller is bottlenecking at 250MB/s

Highpoint claim a RR2320 will do almost 500MB/s reads so understandably I'm a touch frustrated. The email's gone off to their support bods so we'll see what they say.

Well Highpoint were singularly unhelpful

However a wee tweak to the benchmark settings and things look a bit more healthy - Linky

 

[ChrisD.]

Most stunning result mate. I'm going to be building up to a 6 disk RAID 5 array with a 7th as a hot swap/spare over the next few months. Speed, capacity and redundancy for very little cost in the grand scheme of things. Just hope the ICH9R controller can keep up!

 

[rpstewart]

6 disk RAID5 on an ICH9R, that could be a bit painful. Granted the RAID5 write performance of the ICH9R is better than it's predecessors but a 6 disk array means a lot of XOR processing, without a dedicated parity engine that's going to be asking a lot.

 

[ChrisD.]

Ah bugger. How much for a decent RAID 5 controller card?

 

[rpstewart]

A couple of hundred will get you a RocketRaid 2320 like mine, not fully hardware but pretty decent. You'll need to go to £300-400 to get a proper 8 port hardware RAID card with onboard cache and an XOR processor - the Areca 1220 is the benchmark card. There are Dell Perc/5i cards out there second hand for £150 or so which is a steal for a full on hardware solution but they're picky about the board you put them in.

 

[Mercutio]

From the review there the 7200.11 'cudda's seemed to have the edge in most of the I/O graphs? I have around 9 drives of random size dotted around my system/room so looking to get them all tidied up (well... at least down to 2x raptors, 2x big fastish drives and a boot drive ). Anyone educate me as to why these are better? (or are they just cheaper?)
Whats a good PCI-e 1x Raid0 card to partner them with?

 

[fobose]

Nooooooo these have shot up to £74.01 now!!! Probably due to them only having 8 left in stock! I will have to wait for them to drop again now

 

[Mattus]

Got mine in today.

Also, some more 'real world' results from PCMark to show the difference between this and the previous generation (Seagate 7200.10):

HDD - Windows Media Center (7200.10): 54.5MB/s
HDD - Windows Media Center - (WD SE16 640GB): 79.7MB/s

HDD - Gaming (7200.10): 12.1MB/s
HDD - Gaming (WD SE16 640GB): 14.4MB/s

HDD - adding music to WMP (7200.10): 5.1MB/s
HDD - adding music to WMP (WD SE16 640GB): 10.0MB/s

HDD - Windows Defender (7200.10): 13.5MB/s
HDD - Windows Defender (WD SE16 640GB): 19.4MB/s

HDD - Application loading (7200.10): 2.7MB/s
HDD - Application loading (WD SE16 640GB): 3.8MB/s

I'm pretty pleased, especially with the results in media type stuff.

 

[fdxd]

My burst speed is low for some reason. Rest of it is fine i guess.

Wonder if there is way to increase the Burst Rate?