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Why 10,000 RPM drives not SATA 3.0Gb/s?

393 Views 6 Replies 6 Participants Last post by  The Duke
According to StorageReview.com...

"Raptor continues to deliver excellent performance and maintains its position as the fastest SATA drive around."

That being the case, why is it that Raptors, which are 10,000 RPM, use 1.5 Gb/s SATA while you see 7200 RPM drives using 3.0Gb/s SATA? Please help me fill in the gaps in my understanding. If the fastest SATA drives are SATA 1.5Gb/s then what is the point of manufacturing slower drives with more bandwidth than is being used by even the fastest drive? It seems to me that if any drive would use the extra bandwidth it would be the 10,000 Raptors.

Any shared insight would be appreciated.
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The band width in the SATA3G are no where close to being used regardless of how fast the HDD spin.
Most barely use the SATAI max.
Further more, there are so many varables in data transfer it's mind boggeling.
There are some 7200RPM SATA3 drives that handle high volume file transfers better than the current Raptors with the likes of masive media files. But on the other hand the Raptor is better overall for the performance of a PC's OS and more realistic file managment.
Give and take, give and take, one attribute don't make for the sum of the whole.
The 300mbps isnt fully utilized yet. Most sata 2 drive DO get above sata 1 speeds of 150mbps. But currently sata drives get around 170-180mbps which IS faster than sata1. So if they did make a SATA 2 10000rpm raptor it'd be faster than the sata 1 by a miniscule amount.
Indeed SATA 150 is barely fully Utilized by anything...SATA 2 would actually be pretty pointless in the long run.

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You have to remember that these are all peak values. NOTHING out there uses all of the bw available of even SATAI when comparing continuous read. That's why the 10k Raptor is faster... It can seek more quickly and therefore has a higher average transfer rate than the rest.

Edit: Even Gigabyte's I-RAM doesn't saturate SATA's bandwidth.
I think the reason is advertisement...
Kind of like the alleged IDE133 which is never met and may do in the high 100 teens at best! That in it's self is why WD refuses to rate there HDDs as IDE133 and the unknowing think WD IDEs suck because there not "IDE133" where as the hit the same peaks as the rest around 118.
So in the same light, standards are far beyond what reality is and benchmarks are synthetic and only create a reasonable tool to compare devices... unless it's a memory bench which mostly suck.
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