Raptor vs SATA II

[BobtheDead]

Im upgrading soon (thats a common theme around here =d) and the one point im still tossing around, hardware-wise, are the hard drives. I like the idea of a couple of raptor's (any size really with ncq), but for the same approx price, or cheaper, I could be enjoying larger sataII drives with more through-put?

Does the faster access time of the raptors beat the greater throughput on current sataII drives?

 

[sturm]

Raptors will be faster. The speeds for Sata II are the maximum theoretical speeds. No drive, not even a raptor, can hit those speeds.
Sata speeds wont be any faster than an IDE drive.
Take a look at the seek times and other times on both sata drives and ide drives. Youll see they are almost always the same or with in a millesecond of each other.

Unless you cant spare a couple of seconds here and there I would go for the larger storage over the speed of the raptor.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

I have a Raptor 74 GB (the new version with the 16MB cache and NCQ) and I love it. It's super fast, and it's not loud at all. I can't hear it over my fans, which are actually pretty quiet as well. Windows boots in a snap, my games load super fast (BF2 still takes a long time, but there's not much can be done about that).

However, if you have a lot of crap then you'll want the larger capacity of a regular 7200RPM drive. With any hard drive, the more stuff is on it, the slower it gets. Therefore, an almost full Raptor may have almost no advantage over a barely half-full regular drive. Besides, you can run regular drives in RAID and get faster transfer speeds than a Raptor, although you can't beat their seek times.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

I'm kinda gonna agree with sturm here. I don't know why the hell they have SATA II drives if the drives can't even fill up a SATA I bandwidth. I guess it's just to make people think they're getting something better. Really the choice is up to you. If you really want them and like the idea of the maybe slightly higher speed than go for it, don't go for RAID 0 though, I've had bad luck with that with all my HDD's. You lose one drive and the whole thing goes down. If not, just get a bigass HDD that you can fill up with all the porn or whatever the hell you want, lol.

Anyways the choice is yours, good luck though!

 

[ZOldDude]

Im upgrading soon (thats a common theme around here =d) and the one point im still tossing around, hardware-wise, are the hard drives. I like the idea of a couple of raptor's (any size really with ncq), but for the same approx price, or cheaper, I could be enjoying larger sataII drives with more through-put?

Does the faster access time of the raptors beat the greater throughput on current sataII drives?

Segate's 7200.10 will read almost a full MBps faster than a Raptor,run cooler and the 320GB model is onsale at Newegg for $104 USD.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Actually, if you want these for gaming (and this is only a very subtle suggestion) you could check out some 15K rpm SCSI hdds. You can get small ones for under $100 and they're fast as all living hell. The only question is whether or not your comp will support SCSI controllers and whatnot as SCSI still has somewhat limited BIOS support.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

True... but this is because of the new perpendicular recording technology.

This is kind of off-topic, but who is that dude in your avatar? He looks familiar...

 

[ches111]

Just so everyone knows,

SATA I and SATA II are just interfaces as stated with "theorhetical higher limits".

Where this comes into play is only when using the interface to its full maximum capacity.

A single SATA "anything" drive will not come close to acheiving the theorhetical max. You would need multiple drives in a Raid array to start to see those types of speeds.

Even two drives of sustained throughput of 50+mb/s do not = 100mb/s throughput. When put into a raid array there is overhead on the raid controller itself "IO scheduling". Depending on the controller it could be very efficient and get a rate of nearly 100mb/s, or not so efficient and be around 80 - 90 mb/s.

The more drives you add to the array the more potential you have toward meeting the max capacity for the interface. This of course depends on the type of Raid [0-5] used.

So in summary,

Single drive = performance as fast as the single drive operates SATA interface is not the bottleneck.

Multiple Drives = perfomance as fast as the controllers capability + the multiple drives capabilities + the type of Raid used. SATA may still not be the bottleneck.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Actually, if you want these for gaming (and this is only a very subtle suggestion) you could check out some 15K rpm SCSI hdds. You can get small ones for under $100 and they're fast as all living hell. The only question is whether or not your comp will support SCSI controllers and whatnot as SCSI still has somewhat limited BIOS support.

Meh, SCSI may be fast as hell, but they're a pain to set up (I know, I've used them) and they're pretty loud. My Raptor is near silent except when it's writing extensively, and I never notice it because it's usually loud only when I'm focused on something I'm shooting or whacking.

That and SCSI cards and drives are expensive. I may look into it in a few years when I have surplus income and a few hours to spend on the drive(s) and card.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Oh I know what you mean, I hate setting them up but I've gotten used to it I guess. It's true, controller cards are expensive especially when you go with RAID 5 like I do.

 

[ches111]

Dante makes a good point,

If you are looking for a single drive, you must look at ALL of its specs.

There are some 7200 rpm drives that give very simlar experience/performance to other 10K drives.

The Raptors are well known because of their overall competance. They have a great MAX READ, MAX WRITE and MAX SUSTAINED for both. They tend to also have something over their competitors which is called their MINIMUM READ/WRITE. Their minimum tends to hang out much higher than most other drives.

 

[ches111]

SATA drives may already be too difficult for the average user to set up "see the multiple requests for help here on THG".

Adding the complexity of SCSI to the equation would more than likely be the kiss of death to a build .

Lets see for it to be a boot device it has to be SCSI ID 0, and which LUN should I use? Wait, Windows does not see the device until the driver for the controller loads "F6 what, special setup what?" See what I mean

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

Like I said... it's only a suggestion. I can completely agree that for the average user it's not worth it to use SCSI's. I personally am still using an IDE HDD but I'm building a new graphics workstation with a 150 GB Raptor as the boot drive. Much, much easier than SCSI's but I'm using SCSI's for the storage. If I were goign for gaming I'd get maybe three 74GB raptors and put them in RAID 5, but that's just me.

 

[hannibal]

Like I said... it's only a suggestion. I can completely agree that for the average user it's not worth it to use SCSI's. I personally am still using an IDE HDD but I'm building a new graphics workstation with a 150 GB Raptor as the boot drive. Much, much easier than SCSI's but I'm using SCSI's for the storage. If I were goign for gaming I'd get maybe three 74GB raptors and put them in RAID 5, but that's just me.

I have raptor150 as the boot drive (and for temp files) and I have 2X 250MB WD drives for programs and documents. It's guite good combination if you are not using raid.
Now a days I would propably take two raptors (in raid) and one big 500 MB WD as storage drive. (Guite expensive, but raptor is so fast...)

Let's see if we can see new version of raptor with perpendicular recording technology in the future + flash memory for Wista... That will be in my next dream rig

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

I hear you, I'm waiting to see if they have a new raptor like that...

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Jeez...SATA isn't really that hard to set up. Unless making a RAID driver floppy is the difficult part...I did it for the first time on Saturday when I installed Windoze on my first build...not complicated at all.

 

[maury73]

You are wrong: SATA-II standard drives have less data throughput than Raptors.
You are confusing interface bandwidth with device data transfer. You'll transfer data at SATA-II maximum speed of (theoretically) 300MB/s when reading/writing to/from the drive cache only, that is about 1% of total data transfers in real world applications.
The real maximum data transfer speed of a fast SATA-II drive is about 60MB/s (average is about 30MB/s) while Raptors have a maximum DTS of 80MB/s with an average of 45MB/s.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Meh, who cares about those measurements. IMO, Raptors feel faster than normal drives. If a larger 7200RPM drive feels faster to you, get it. If a Raptor feels quickest, go with that. Also consider how much data you'll collect. I put a foot in both camps. I bought a 74GB Raptor for Windows and programs and a pair of 250GBs for Linux/Vista Beta and data, respectively.

 

[MrCommunistGen]

Its probably the seek times on the Raptors that help. My RAID0 averages at a tad under 100MB/s and peaks at over 130MB/s. That in mind, booting Windows or apps doesn't feel any faster than before I got the RAID because those usages are more dependent on seek time than throughput. Transfering a few really large documents at a time is MUCH faster though. If I didn't also need the extra storage I probably would have gotten a Raptor instead of 2 7200RPM drives for a RAID. I have 320GB of storage now though which I really needed.

-mcg

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

I agree completely. If you need the space, get it.

 

[weekendwarrior]

I can post HD-Tach results for 4 160GB 7200 RPM SATA-II drives in a RAID-0. It's pretty fast. A RAID with four Raptors can beat it. Drives haven't caught up to SATA-I speeds yet, which is why the Raptors are still SATA-I. SATA-II is a marketing gimmick at this point. When Raptors go perpendicular, and they surpass the speed the SATA-I bus can handle, you can bet your hind-parts they'll be releasing SATA-II drives. Right now, they don't need to, because they aren't fast enough to need SATA-II. Neither is any other drive on the market today.

The ~600 MB RAID 0 is plenty big enough and fast enough for all the gaming I do. I wouldn't be able to surpass them with a single Raptor, and perhaps not even with 2. I'll wait til the next generation of Raptors come out

 

[Nitro350Z]

What about the gigabyte I-ram thing? its sata I but its still good, great access times and transfer speeds, if only it was sataII.

it is a bit expensive, but if you want the best...
its silent too, so it beats any hd in that aspect.

 

[weekendwarrior]

The RAM drives made of flash are too slow, and the ones made of SDRAM are volatile. When they get some good hybrid raptors, the world will smile a little more brightly.

 

[michaelahess]

I'm worried about you people if you think scsi is difficult to setup, it's like a slave/master on steroids, and f6 aint paticularly hard guys.

I'd just go with two Samsung Spinpoint 2504c's in RAID0, and to those who can't seem to keep drives from failing, stop touching them and keep them cool! I've had various RAID0's on every manufacturers drives run for years without problems. If you have critical data back it up, RAID1 or 5 is NOT a replacement for backups either.

 

[Dante_Jose_Cuervo]

I can see where you're coming from. Though you didn't directly respond to my post the problem with my older SCSI setup is that even with termination and everything setup right my OS wouldn't recognize the drives. Needed to get all the latest drivers and whatnot for my mobo and I was fine. On the topic of RAID 0 I have no idea why but my drives always fail within a year, but I totally agree that RAID 1 or 5 are a substitute for backup. I still backup with my old RAID 5 setup. I was just giving some insight from my experiences.