We saw the Signature series for the first time at CES 2008 in Antec's suite, and some of the details caught our attention. We were shown a dual-layered power supply with a PWM controlled fan and a DC-to-DC conversion for the lower voltage rails such as 3.3V and 5V. A few weeks ago, Antec sent us a message saying that we would be getting the first unit of this power supply to test. Hot off the production line, it finally arrived this week.

Antec is perhaps better known for their cases, which have some very nice acoustic and design concepts and are built for midrange to high-end enthusiasts. With the Signature series, Antec wants to leave its mark on the PSU market and enhance their reputation for quality power. Antec took a long time to develop this power supply and it will form, with the TruePower Quattro series, the arrowhead of Antec's line-up of power supplies. There are currently 650W and 850W versions in this series, and we will review the larger one today. The 650W version will also be of interest to the market as 650W units are mostly used for the midrange PCs that dominate the market in terms of volume.

As stated by Antec we will find voltage regulator modules (VRM) inside this power supply that are DC-to-DC converters. This means we will only get the 12V from the transformer and the lower voltage rails are generated by the VRM. Advantages as stated by Antec are short transient response times within the power supply. Furthermore, Antec includes a PWM controlled fan that has the advantage of being able to run at only 10-15% of its normal rated top speed. We will see later that this results in very low fan speeds and therefore low acoustic noises. According to Antec, all of the capacitors are of Japanese make, which is an indication of high quality and performance. The Antec Signature series received the 80plus Bronze certification which means we can expect very high efficiency from these units.

The label shows 25A on the 3.3V and 5V rails, which will be fine with modern systems. The max combined power of these two rails is 160W. There are four 12V rails, two rated at 22A and two with 25A on tap. We take it that the last two rails are specifically there for the graphics cards as the spec sheet says something about a maximum usage of 300W from each card. The combined power of all the 12V rails together is 65A, which equals 780W of power. The UL number gives us Antec as the manufacturer, but we later found another UL number hidden inside the power supply that indicates the real manufacturer of the PCBs.

Read more...

The next version of the Raptor launched as the WD740GD in December of 2003 and boasted several needed enhancements. These enhancements included a capacity upgrade to 74GB, 4.6 millisecond read seek time, a FDB based motor to address noise concerns, and ATA-4 tagged command queuing. While TCQ was a welcome addition and certainly improved the drive's I/O operations, it still was not a match for most SCSI drives in the enterprise market. This was primarily due to a lack of SATA controllers that fully supported TCQ and firmware that was not as mature as the SCSI competition.

Computer enthusiasts flocked to the drive due to its performance advantages, but the drive continued to have limited success in the enterprise server market. The last major update to the Raptor family occurred in January of 2006 when the WD1500ADFD launched with a significant list of improvements. This drive still sported the familiar 10,000 RPM spindle speed, 4.6ms read seek time, and a two-platter design now at 150GB capacity. The platter's density increased to 75GB+ and equaled that of several 10,000 RPM SCSI competitors. The buffer size doubled to 16MB, matching the latest offerings from other drive manufacturers, and a native SATA implementation with Native Command Queuing became standard.

The WD1500ADFD became the de facto drive for enthusiasts and for a while, its 150GB capacity was acceptable. (Price was still a concern for some, of course, and many people were content to get larger, cheaper, quieter drives that performed more than adequately in most usage scenarios.) Since the drive's introduction, we have seen an explosion in capacities with terabyte drives becoming normal fare from the drive suppliers and the sweet spot in the drive market slowly inching up to the 500GB range now. Not only did the capacity of the Raptor series seem small, the latest SATA 3 Gb/s 7200RPM drives were starting to offer equal or better performance in several areas at greatly reduced per-gigabyte prices.

As of today, Western Digital is announcing their fourth-generation design, aptly named the "VelociRaptor" as a nod to its promised capabilities. The capacity is now at 300GB and that is the least of changes for the new VR150 product family. Western Digital took a serious look at the enterprise market and determined they needed a product design that could compete in the widely expanding enterprise market where 2.5" form factor drives are taking a foothold due to the ability to pack more drives into the same chassis footprint. The other advantage to a 2.5" form factor is reduced power consumption, a hot topic in today's energy-aware world.

With that market in mind, Western Digital has moved to a 2.5" form factor with the VelociRaptor, while at the same time providing a unique 3.5" chassis mounting system for the enthusiast desktop market. This mounting system is named "IcePAK" and features a finned aluminum design that offers some degree of thermal dissipation. However, its primary purpose is to ensure this drive works in the multitude of desktop chassis. The drawback is the IcePAK mounting system does not work with standard SATA backplanes found in several rack-mounted servers. To address the enterprise market, WD will ship the drive without the IcePAK chassis.

Read more...