One wonders if, perhaps, "RAID Optimized" means it has better servo technology which can deal with vibration in the data center. Most of these consumer drives like DiamondMax & friends look fine on paper and in benchmarks, but their performance suffers, sometimes dramatically, when mounted in a rack with 15 other disks, all thrashing their heads back and forth. The shock of an adjacent disk seeking can disturb the tracking in a disk, and this effect is especially pronounced when the platters are very high density. This is why actual enterprise hard disks are still 74 or 36GB, and why they cost more: their servo electronics are much more sophisticated.

In some cases the transaction rates on these disks can fall by as much as 90% in a rack environment. A decent disk like a Cheetah 15k does not have that problem.

I'd like to see a review / comparison of the Maxtor MaXline III
The benches over at StorageReview (they don't have a review posted yet) make it look like the strongest 7200rpm SATA drive, and very close to the 74GB Raptor in many tests.

>>> see how the Caviar RE2 stacks up

Last week I put 2 Caviar RE2s into a dual PowerMac G5 system. As in your tests, my benchmarks showed that the Western Digital 400GB performs about the same as my other drives. The big difference showed up when I configured RAID. It looks like the secret for maximizing drive performance is to use multiple drives with clever partitioning & RAID. I use RAID-1 (mirrors) for reliability, and RAID-0 (stripes) for speed. Below are my results.

SoftRAID Striped 120GB
222 sec +/- 4 sec
78 GB/s
SoftRAID Mirrored 300GB
325 sec +/- 2 sec
54 GB/s
Apple's DiskUtility on Mirrored 300GB
424 sec
41 GB/s
Apple's DiskUtility on 100 GB partition of the 400GB disk
435 sec +/- 1 sec
40 GB/s
Apple's DiskUtility on 160 GB partition of the 160GB disk
413 sec +/- 1 sec
42 GB/s

Skip Steuart
360s.com

I too have the whine. I have 2 120GB JB's and I have been trying to make my pc more quiet over the years, the drives make the biggest noise. My plan is to replace them both with 200+ GB Seagate drives to get the noise level down.

Great review of what appears to be a nice drive!

It's a 4-platter design, eh? I suppose that's marginally better than Hitachi's large drives (which have 5 platters IIRC).

I won't be buying any large drives any time soon; my recent exit from doing database consulting work means I've got an oversupply of spare hard drive space right now; deleting several 100+ GB databases from your system will tend to do that! :D It would be rather hard for me to justify buying a drive with this much space... though I'm sure it would be faster than what I've got.

Re Western Digital whine: I agree, WD drives from 3+ years ago had a tendency to develop a truly mind-numbing whine after a few months. They seem to have this under control with their newer drives though, as they have finally moved to fluid dynamic bearings.

Man, those numbers are beyond pathetic. It just goes to show you that the hard drive market has really not put any real performance improvements beyond 1-10%. I wont even get into SCSI or SAS drives, but the Raptor did a number on this one.

Do they support hot-plug?

I hate to mention the age old ? "Wheres the new Raptors?"

Sweet. I'll take two platters please.

WD Raptors are at least 2 years old now. And they still are fairly untouchable. Amazing.

I am eyeballing these drives for new storage server. To replace my aging Proliant 3000 with 300GB.

I found several chassis that offer SATA hotswap and a 8 port RAID card for under 1k.

Then all I need AMD MB, and some RAM, and a proc. Nothing fancy I don't need enterprise lvl preformance.

Then I was going to slap in a bunch of RE drives ftw. Thinking 6, 250s for 1.25 TB. :D

dang that's a nice piece of drive, only issue for me would be having 400gb of data on a single drive is a lot to lose in one bang.... would need to be careful about backing up

Damn that's an impressive IOMeter showing. Considering that worstcase performance tends to matter more than shaving a fraction of a second off a game level load, this drive looks to be a winner.

Dang, this gives the seagates a run for their money. I have always thought of WD to be a close second in terms of reliability (well except for the fact all of mine whine..) so I could see myself purchasing one.

A second dang goes out to the fact your opening statements made me think a new raptor-like drive was out. Someday eh?