Garfield_the_Cat

Thanks for adding the Samsung 830 and the Plextor drive to the charts!

+1 M4, Samsung 830, Plextor M3, and high end sandforce would be great. All the sandforce drives are pretty similar, but comparing between "families" would be a big help/

I thought I might have seen this posted a while ago, but some guys over on XS are stress-testing several SSD's non-stop to determine how and when they will die. Link Mostly testing the smallest size drives for obvious reasons, but several SSD's are at over 100Terabytes written already. Very interesting thread to follow, to see what happens.

Interesting (I'm oonly looking at SSD results). So basically all sandforce drives have about the same (within 1%) failure rate. I thought Kingston was a rebranded Intel drive? I wonder why the difference in failure rate between it and the Intel. I do wonder if user error could be to blame for some, I guess we will never know what the reason for return was.

Does this count? Hardware Canucks

I agree 100%, I would respectfully ask for this as well. I too spend a lot of time scrolling up and down trying to figure out where each drive is. Otherwise, good review!

Hmmm......I find it hard to take seriously an article with writing like this. Given that TRIM is supported by Windows 7, Linux, and BSD I believe, TRIM isn't limited to just PC users. This sounds more like sour grapes from a Apple fanboy.

Wow, blast from the past! Haven't read a supercaff post in forever, along with some others that have posted here. I remember some long threads involving SC, including at least one flame-fest with Davin.:lol::lol: Anyone see posts from BBH? He was another respected poster that I haven't seen in a long time. And remember Tannin when he was around?

Thanks, I figured it wasn't easy, otherwise you would have already found one to test on.

Thanks for the review. Any chance you could find a non-RAID 6gbps SATA card that doesn't have problems with the C300? I ask because I bet most people don't really want to pay another $300 for a RAID card. I read at the end of the review that the one you had didn't work well, but we really can't tell (or at least I can't) what the real improvement from a 3 ->6 gbps controller is since the RAID card probably artificially inflates the C300 score. Thanks

All time favorite? Seagate 40Meg MFM drive. I think it was a ST-251. That was back in the day when you could run software to check for drive interleaving, and change it to speed things up. That drive lasted forever for me. Current favorite? X-25M It's nice, fast, cool, and quiet. (but not cheap)

sorry for my noobishness, but from what I've understood, there's three essential statistics about a hard drive: read & write speed (linear access) , and access time (random access). Now I might miss other things ... great ... I've read so many reviews filled with boring statistics... But not a lot of literature concerning "intended use" (go and figure out yourself). You forgot the most important thing that determines the "speed" of a hard drive: firmware The access time and transfer rates show only the physical stats of the drive, but not how well the firmware uses them. If you look at this SR chart , it shows the 15k.4 and 15k.5 . Despite the newer version having faster access, and higher STR, it shows that it is slower then the older version for *single user* benchmarks. So the newer "faster" drive (by specs) is actually slower in real-world usage (for single users of course). What causes this? The firmware. In fact, SCSI drives are not the fastest anymore for workstations and single users, because their firmware is being optimized for multi-user server usage. That's why the server benchmarks show an increase from the older to newer drive. As a result of that, the single-user scores go down. But even in regular SATA drives, look at the WD Black 1Tb and the Samsung F1 1tb drives. They have roughly the same specs, and use roughly the same platter densities. It's the drives firmware that really makes the difference in benchmark testing, since their physical specs are all about the same.

New drives added Interesting that retail Vraptor is so much louder then the beta. Also, the WD black 1Tb looks pretty good, slightly faster then the F1, but uses slight more power.

What he said......both are faster then the Hitachi drives. This Techreport link has all of these drives in their review of the VRaptor. They also include noise and power draw for all these drives.

I would say one large fast drive is fine. IF you wanted to, you could get two drives, and put the OS on one and Apps/games on the other. This would also let you put a page file on both drives, and let the OS decide which page file to use, which might help a little. But overall, one drive is fine. If you really want fast, you could get the 300gig Vraptor (it's $300), but I'd go with the more reasonable choise of the WD 640gig or Samsung F1 1tb, both of which are within ~10% of the Vraptor, but less expensive. (~$90 for the 640gig, $180 for the 1tb)