All those RPMS?

Chart

Distinguished
Jun 7, 2006
15
0
18,510
So I'm building a new PC from scratch. This guy here at work did the following. He got a 74GB WD Raptor 10000 RPM hard drive, where he installs his OS and apps, and got another, higher capacity 7200RPM drive for his data (music, movies). He swears it's screaming fast and insists I should do that. Now I looked at some prices, and 200$CAN for a 74GB just sounds wrong to me. Will I really see that much of a performance increase? Will it be enough to justify the bill?
 
No.

Unless you just want to boot 5 seconds faster.
And unless you work on large files such as PDF, Image, Video,

Basicly if you want to load stuff faster you will notice... but thats it. games and such wont go faster.
 

mpjesse

Splendid
I strongly (and respectfully) disagree with CompTia. I'm one of those guys who went from a 7200rpm drive to a 10000rpm drive. EVERYTHING loads faster. Take in consideration that the hard drive is a computer systems biggest bottleneck. The faster the RPMs... well the faster everything loads.

$200 CAN is about right.

I would definitely recommend a 10,000 rpm raptor to anyone looking for a decent performance boost. And yes, it's well worth the money. Just ask anyone who has a 10,000 rpm drive.
 

whiskeychaser

Distinguished
Aug 8, 2006
1
0
18,510
I have yet to upgrade a component that improved the everyday performance of my pc more then when I installed the raptor. Trust me, you will not be disappointed. 8O
 

Chart

Distinguished
Jun 7, 2006
15
0
18,510
That's the thing though, I am not going to be setting up anything in a raid. /sigh, fine I'll go with the 10k drive then. Thanks for the infos guys!
 

noblekitty

Distinguished
Feb 17, 2006
117
0
18,680
Raptors are ok, but if you look carefully on ebay, you will find better stuffs out there @ a better price

only 10k rpm? how about 15k rpm, 150gb, 3.7 ms average read, 16 mb cache, 320MBps:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...20014748437&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MEWA:IT&rd=1

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...20015030788&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MEWA:IT&rd=1

and a good controller?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...20014558412&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MEWA:IT&rd=1

you can also do raid 5 with 3 drives and get better performance than raid 0 + data security better than 1 drive alone. For around $200 US dollars, if you are lucky, you can get 2 drives + 1 controller and will have a lot of fun with them.

It's funny for those who see the Raptor from WD for the first time and got excited over it. I have been using 10k rpm drives since 1999 with UW2 SCSI. They are fast, but they are also loud and hot.
 
mpjesse is right, performace is a noticable upgrade from the 7200rpm. But, this realy imo applies to booting and loading stuff, but not to making games and such run faster. Now You didnt realy say what this was for though. If you were to say you do digital art / video work I would say YA! But otherwise, it seems like an expencive upgrade so you dont have to wait so long for the computer to turn on.


....hmmm.
I do video editing, photoshoping 50mb digital images.....

Maybe I should finaly get one?
 

Chart

Distinguished
Jun 7, 2006
15
0
18,510
Ok, this PC is going to be used for gaming (of course), but also development (I'm a programmer). I'm trying getting into games development, so I assume I'll end up dealing with the graphic side of things too.
 
And you have a backup solution for what your doing? Like raid 1, external HDD... Bad way to start getting into something is to lose it right afterwards. But at this point its up to you and your cash. If your going to be working with 3d graphics for game development, then you will see a good improvement for that for sure. (unless your talking about 8bit gamming).
 

noblekitty

Distinguished
Feb 17, 2006
117
0
18,680
All data from that HDD is lost for ever.

Not really, if the data is very important and worth the money, there are people who can retrieve datas from virtually any dead drive @ some cost of money, of course. Unless you intentionally use a tape eraser to destroy data on the platters, people can remove the platters from a dead drive in a clean room or use special software to retrieve data.

just one example:
http://www.vantagetech.com/emergency.html

And of course, the FBI can also help you out with that too, involuntary most of the time :D
 
Yes I know... But for the average joe, spending $2000 on drive information recovery hurts!.


But to make my post clearer,
You can in fact spend thousands and thousands of dollars recovering data. I ment my post as satire mostly.
 

DaveUK

Distinguished
Apr 23, 2006
383
0
18,790
Again, I'd buy a 74GB Raptor as an OS/application installation drive, a 250GB Seagate Spinpoint 10, and a copy of Norton Ghost.

Install your OS and Games etc on the Raptor for speedier loading, and put all your large files / storage / general crap on the higher-capacity 7200RPM drive. Set Norton Ghost to automatically create a full drive image of the Raptor onto the secondary drive at 2AM every monday morning.

You have speed, you have capacity, and you have piece of mind. If the Raptor dies, then you have a full ghost backup. If the Seagate dies then you have to download your pr0n again but your OS is intact. If both drives die at once then consider yourself a) fucked b) extremely unlucky, and if it brings you to tears theres always NAS.
 

guruboy

Distinguished
Aug 7, 2006
59
0
18,630
What about any HDD that runs at 7200 rpm but is rated at 3.0Gb/s? People on the 'egg say they've experienced much faster load times with a new 3.0Gb/s drive. I just got a 250Gb one from WD for about $80 USD, pretty good bargain. It's also just safer to spin something at 72% of another, you know?
 

SomeJoe7777

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2006
1,081
0
19,280
It's just that in general SATA 3.0 drives comes with newer mechanism, higher density platter and extra cache. That where the improved speed comes from, not from 1.5GB/s to 3.0Gb/s.

Also, several SATA II (3.0 Gb/sec) drives now support NCQ, whereas a lot of SATA I (1.5 Gb/sec) drives left out support of this feature.

Of course, you must have your SATA controller in SATA native mode (AHCI) to take advantage of NCQ -- IDE emulation mode will not use NCQ.
 

SomeJoe7777

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2006
1,081
0
19,280
You do realize NCQ slows down single-user performance don't you?

Please post a link to testing or other evidence of this. I have not heard of such a thing.

SCSI drives have had command queueing for years, and to my knowledge, no one has ever said that that function slowed anything down.
 

ZOldDude

Distinguished
Apr 22, 2006
1,251
1
19,280
So I'm building a new PC from scratch. This guy here at work did the following. He got a 74GB WD Raptor 10000 RPM hard drive, where he installs his OS and apps, and got another, higher capacity 7200RPM drive for his data (music, movies). He swears it's screaming fast and insists I should do that. Now I looked at some prices, and 200$CAN for a 74GB just sounds wrong to me. Will I really see that much of a performance increase? Will it be enough to justify the bill?

The new Seagate 7200.10 drives READ almost a full MBps faster than a Raptor,run cooler and cost a whole lot less. The 200GB size was on Newegg for $104 a few weeks ago.

For the price of that Raptor you can have two 200GB drives that read faster.

You can get then in ATA or SATA and sizes from 200-750 GB.
The speed comes from the new drive format that puts 3 times the info in the same amout of space.
 

mpjesse

Splendid
You do realize NCQ slows down single-user performance don't you?

Please post a link to testing or other evidence of this. I have not heard of such a thing.

SCSI drives have had command queueing for years, and to my knowledge, no one has ever said that that function slowed anything down.

It's true. NCQ has consistently been shown to actually slow performance down in certain situations synonymous with single user use. Now, we're talking about a 10% decrease AT THE MOST. Here's a link:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_8.html
 

SomeJoe7777

Distinguished
Apr 14, 2006
1,081
0
19,280

A very interesting article.

Now, the question in my mind is: Do SCSI drives, which have a mature command queueing implementation, exhibit the same performance decrease with those same benchmarks? In other words, is the decrease in performance for a lightly-multitasked benchmark suite inherent in the philosophy of command queueing, or is the source of the performance decrease the fact that NCQ/TCQ implementations in SATA drives and chipsets are not mature?

It would be interesting to put this to the test with some of the SCSI drives (provided that you could turn command queueing off somehow on those drives).

In addition, I noticed that their tests always involved the same SATA chipset (a Silicon Image controller if I remember correctly). Do other SATA chipsets show this same performance decrease? Perhaps SI has not done things optimally in their chip.

It will be interesting to see repeated benchmarks of this type done as the NCQ capabilities of SATA drives & chipsets improve with the future generations.
 

kitchenshark

Distinguished
Dec 30, 2005
377
0
18,780
I would say that my Raptor has definitely made my computer more responsive. It's true that not everything will benefit from the Raptor, however, load times, boot times will improve. Also if you work with large files you will see a very large boost in performance.

I had a Maxtor IDE hard drive I purchased at the same time as my Raptor and I encoded a video stream using each drive. The Raptor took the encode time from 44 minutes to around 20 minutes.

For me, the performance I get was definitely worth the $.
 

Chart

Distinguished
Jun 7, 2006
15
0
18,510
Thanks for all the answers guys, this certainly has sparked an interesting discussion.

I'm going with the 74Gb raptor and my external drive for backup.