8 replies to this topic

[Frost]

Weird topic, I know, but I just had to share. If your drives are in a vertical arrangement and you want to see if they can run cooler ... try just swapping their positions.

I decided to move my Velociraptor to the upper bay and my Constellation to the lower bay in my G5 while putting in some new RAM, just because I felt like the startup drive being in the upper bay and I wanted an excuse to tinker around. Instant, and huge, average temperature change after I buttoned the machine back up.


Before:

Bay A (Upper): Constellation
Average operating temperature: 107°F
Bay B (Lower): Velociraptor
Average operating temperature: 97°F


After:

Bay A (Upper): Velociraptor
Average operating temperature: 83°F
Bay B (Lower): Constellation
Average operating temperature: 88°F



Even under heavy use, the Velociraptor only hits 90°F, and the Constellation peaked out around 99°F.

Cool!

[Thain Esh Kelch]

It is because you meassure everything in fahrenheit. Use a proper meassuring scale for temperature and you'll see sensible results.

(Did you check the temperature after a fresh boot, and with the machine having cooled down prior?)

[Sneaky Snake]

real world speaking, how much much noticeably faster is the Velociraptor? I know for SSD's its a night and day difference, but i've never used a Velociraptor

[Frost]

Thain Esh Kelch, on 02 February 2013 - 07:12 AM, said:

It is because you meassure everything in fahrenheit. Use a proper meassuring scale for temperature and you'll see sensible results.

(Did you check the temperature after a fresh boot, and with the machine having cooled down prior?)

Pfft, Celsius is for the imprecise. When I don't have decimal degrees available, Fahrenheit is more gooder!

And yep, this was after running for a few hours. The original LCS in my G5 died on me back in 2010 and I could only run the system on one processor till I could get a replacement, and even then it was bumping up against overtemp sleep if I got too aggressive. As a result, these days I always have iStat Pro open in my dashboard on all my machines to keep me apprised of what's going on temp- and fan-wise.

I really can't think of why it'd do that other than for whatever reason, the way the Velociraptor's IcePak (heatsink tray) sheds heat was turning the drive bay into a convection oven and heating in harmony with the Constellation's heat output. I'd assumed all this time that both drives just ran on the hot side, or the drive bay design in the G5 wasn't the greatest. However, invert them, and the heat is apparently going almost totally out the back now like it should be.

Sneaky Snake, on 02 February 2013 - 01:11 PM, said:

real world speaking, how much much noticeably faster is the Velociraptor? I know for SSD's its a night and day difference, but i've never used a Velociraptor

It really depends on what you're doing. With very large random read/writes, the Velociraptor smokes other HDDs, but still gets slain by SSDs by a huge margin. Sequential reads though, it's almost as fast as lower-end SSDs, and with sequential writes it's actually faster than some.

Real world usage speaking, it feels nearly as snappy as an SSD, and it cut my G5's Leopard boot time nearly in half over the 250GB Caviar Black that Apple had originally put in it. Windows, even non-cached ones, open with their contents instantly available, and in the very rare instance I'm using all my RAM and data starts getting written to disk, there is a HUGE difference over a regular HDD.

That said, it has become a niche product, but it stills fills that niche quite well. For my needs, my PowerMac stills gets used regularly for business purposes, and that involves large amounts of data, so I needed to bump up my capacity. Still need to be able to use 10.4 Tiger though, so that capped me at 2TB per drive. I was thinking of getting a pair of 2TB Constellations, but then had a look at the 6th gen Velociraptors, noticed their capacity had soared from 600GB to 1TB, and that they were receiving glowing reviews, so I went the route of swapping my 250GB Caviar Black and 1.5TB Barracuda for a 1TB Velociraptor and 2TB Constellation. Gives me 3TB to work with without having to use up much-needed ports on externals, and the extreme speed totally breathed new life into the G5.

Considering 1TB SSDs still cost more than a brand new computer and I got the Velociraptor off NewEgg for about $220, I'd say it was worth it in many ways.

It's also an enterprise drive, so 5 year warranty in an era where drivemakers are screwing us on consumer drives with 1 and 2 year warranties, and even SSDs don't exceed 3.

Really the only downside is when it's working hard, it's noisy. Whereas the Constellation working is a gentle, barely audible *tickticktick*, the Velociraptor is a very audible *CLICK-K-K-KCLICKITYCLICK*. That's why I originally put it in the lower bay, just a bit more sound gets absorbed that way. For a 10-20 degree swing in operating temperature though... yeah. It's staying in the upper bay now.

[Sneaky Snake]

Frost, on 02 February 2013 - 06:46 PM, said:

Pfft, Celsius is for the imprecise. When I don't have decimal degrees available, Fahrenheit is more gooder!

And yep, this was after running for a few hours. The original LCS in my G5 died on me back in 2010 and I could only run the system on one processor till I could get a replacement, and even then it was bumping up against overtemp sleep if I got too aggressive. As a result, these days I always have iStat Pro open in my dashboard on all my machines to keep me apprised of what's going on temp- and fan-wise.

I really can't think of why it'd do that other than for whatever reason, the way the Velociraptor's IcePak (heatsink tray) sheds heat was turning the drive bay into a convection oven and heating in harmony with the Constellation's heat output. I'd assumed all this time that both drives just ran on the hot side, or the drive bay design in the G5 wasn't the greatest. However, invert them, and the heat is apparently going almost totally out the back now like it should be.


It really depends on what you're doing. With very large random read/writes, the Velociraptor smokes other HDDs, but still gets slain by SSDs by a huge margin. Sequential reads though, it's almost as fast as lower-end SSDs, and with sequential writes it's actually faster than some.

Real world usage speaking, it feels nearly as snappy as an SSD, and it cut my G5's Leopard boot time nearly in half over the 250GB Caviar Black that Apple had originally put in it. Windows, even non-cached ones, open with their contents instantly available, and in the very rare instance I'm using all my RAM and data starts getting written to disk, there is a HUGE difference over a regular HDD.

That said, it has become a niche product, but it stills fills that niche quite well. For my needs, my PowerMac stills gets used regularly for business purposes, and that involves large amounts of data, so I needed to bump up my capacity. Still need to be able to use 10.4 Tiger though, so that capped me at 2TB per drive. I was thinking of getting a pair of 2TB Constellations, but then had a look at the 6th gen Velociraptors, noticed their capacity had soared from 600GB to 1TB, and that they were receiving glowing reviews, so I went the route of swapping my 250GB Caviar Black and 1.5TB Barracuda for a 1TB Velociraptor and 2TB Constellation. Gives me 3TB to work with without having to use up much-needed ports on externals, and the extreme speed totally breathed new life into the G5.

Considering 1TB SSDs still cost more than a brand new computer and I got the Velociraptor off NewEgg for about $220, I'd say it was worth it in many ways.

It's also an enterprise drive, so 5 year warranty in an era where drivemakers are screwing us on consumer drives with 1 and 2 year warranties, and even SSDs don't exceed 3.

Really the only downside is when it's working hard, it's noisy. Whereas the Constellation working is a gentle, barely audible *tickticktick*, the Velociraptor is a very audible *CLICK-K-K-KCLICKITYCLICK*. That's why I originally put it in the lower bay, just a bit more sound gets absorbed that way. For a 10-20 degree swing in operating temperature though... yeah. It's staying in the upper bay now.

How many drive bays does your PowerMac have?

[Tesseract]

The G5s only ever had two, apart from third party kits that added more in the PCI area.

[Frost]

Yeah, G5s were awesome, but for some reason Apple decided to shaft G5 owners on drive bays. Mac Pros and MDD PowerMacs have/had four, and even my Digital Audio PowerMac G4 has three.

That said, I died and went to heaven when I first put a new drive in the G5 in comparison to installing them in 90s era PowerMacs, and even my easy-to-service G4. Flip a tab, slide it in, put connectors in, done.

[Sneaky Snake]

I really must get myself a Mac Pro one day. I miss playing around with a tower

[Frost]

It really is a guilty pleasure.