Computer Reviews

The Western Digital Raptor hard drives have made quite a stir in the world of hard drives. A few years back they managed to come in as the leading contendor for the desktop market, being placed into high end machines. The original intention was for them to make grounds in the server market. The Raptor X aims squarely at the enthusiast performance market for top of the line desktop computers. The most obvious of the enthusiast features is the clear window, displaying the guts of the hard drive.

It doubles the size of its predecessor, and ups the performance. At tomshardware they take a look at just how fast this drive is and compare it to the other options available to achieve this level of performance, RAID 0. For a similar price you can get 2 ordinary drives and put them together in a RAID 0 array (where the data is striped over both drives) which also offers very solid performance.

However, this drive still manages to top those in tests. It is also a single drive, making installation easy, and because of a long 5 year warranty, you don’t have to double your worry with 2 drives that could fail.

All in all this is a wicked fast drive. If you need the best, then this is it, there is no competition. With a price tag of around $300 for the non-window version and $350 for the windowed version, it is not cheap, but certainly a worthwhile investment.

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Portability is one of the factors that has spurred on the rush for small compact flash disk drives recently. Although they are very convenient and very reliable for the most part, they are still a little on the small side when compared to how much information hard drives can store.

One alternative is to get a portable hard drive. This is basically a hard drive built inside and enclosure that than just needs power and to be connected by USB or Firewire to a computer.

But still the problem remains. With the much higher cost of small portable drives, what do you do if you need to transport a LOT of information at the same time, but don’t want to dish out the immense amount of money needed for a 4GB flash drive.

Portable hard disks have been expensive, but there is now another option possible for those looking to get the size without the cost. The answer is hard drive enclosures. You can just get the case that you put your hard drive into and it will immediately become a massive store of data for you to use.

Setting it up is easy, just open it up connect the power plug and the IDE plug to the drive, close it up and away you go.

I would highly recommend this solution for anyone who needs to transport lots of information. If the drive you have inside is too small, the cost of upgrading the drive is not nearly as much as a memory stick upgrade.

Hard drives are always a bottleneck in the computer system. The mechanical nature of disks means there needs to be a physical movement of the platter inside to find the correct spot on the disk where the information you need has been stored.

Although they have gotten much faster with spindle speeds in such disks as the Western Digital Raptor reaching 10000RPM and transfer rates of up to 300MB/s available, this is still a far cry from the speeds available from main memory and the computers processor’s onboard cache.

The Gigabyte I-RAM intends to make up this area with a product that doesn’t break the bank like solid state drives do, but to offer a good balance between pricing and speed for slightly more permanent data storage than memory, but much faster speeds than those obtainable from a hard drive.

It takes 4 sticks of DIMMs to fill out the memory requirements. They are attached to the card which goes into a PCI slot. It connects to a SATA connection which is where the data is transferred. Storage is only semi-premanent, with a battery holding data if the computer is reset, but can only hold it for a few hours at the most.

The drive itself compares well to ordinary drives in tests at hothardware.com where it beat other drives hands down in all but buffered/burst speed tests.

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