seagate 750gb or 2 74gb raptors?

[Prkchpsndwiches]

Zipzoomfly has the 750gb seagate for only 339.99 right now. I was going to go with 2 raptors originally, but they would be 318.00. So for another $22 I'd get an extra 600gb in storage, but would also lose out on the speed.

Are the raptors really worth it for a gaming pc?...or should I go with the seagate?


thanks

Paul

 

[Heyyou27]

Get the Seagate; it's as fast as the Raptor 150, while holding 5x as much data.

 

[Prkchpsndwiches]

I though the raptor 150 was 10k rpm to???

 

[The_Prophecy]

The Raptor is a 10k RPM drive, but the performance evens out because while the Raptor may have faster access times, but the Seagate has a higher data throughput. I would actually scrap both ideas and go for 3 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB drives.You end up with more space than a single 750GB drive, for less money. You can also RAID 0 the first 2 of them for performance, and anything you don't want to lose (in case one of the drive crashes), move over to the other 320GB drive.

 

[Prkchpsndwiches]

Is it hard to setup a RAID? I know you set it up through the bios, but is there any special wiring? Just curious.

Thanks!

Plus if someone could link up what cable I'd need for the HD, that'd be great. Most likely I'll buy an OEM , so I'm assuming I'll just need a SATA 3.0 cable for each drive?

thanks again

 

[plac]

I had two Seagate 320GB in raid0 at first. Then i went to two 74gb raptors in raid0. (All disks above were 16mb cache). For gaming/file access, you cant beat the Raptors access time. Sure the larger disks may show a little bit more bandwidth, but the access time is most important to me. I have HD tach records of both setups.

 

[Prkchpsndwiches]

which segates? the new perp tech ones or...?

 

[plac]

no, ive never tried the perp ones.

these were just 7200rpm 16mb cacahe satas.

 

[IcY18]

no, ive never tried the perp ones.

these were just 7200rpm 16mb cacahe satas.

the perpendicular ones have equal and in some cases better than performance than the raptors, they are in most cases very close...at this point the price increase of going to the raptor hd's wouldnt be worth it, especially since they are low on space, imho The_Prophecy has a great solution but in the end is huge overkill...but nevertheless still a better solution, if in the end you just want a raptor to have one, get the 74GB or even the 36GB and put all your games/os on it then get the 320GB Seagate with perpendicular recording for all other non-essential programs...

 

[Hoppy6698]

1 - The Raptors are the fastest for access/read times .. period. Several reviews, to include here at TH confirm that a 2.9ms time is still faster than the 8.2ms timing for Seagates.

2 - Icy has a point. Get a Raptor if you feel it necessary for the OS and gaming access times. This is the only reason I got one. That and the $50 rebate was too tempting. But if you go this route, be sure to get the 16MB cache versions, the 8MB versions can be solidly beat by the Seagates. Also, turn off the NCQ for faster times - the NCQ only improves multiple program access, making it a more fluid ramp up as more points attempt to access the discs. Get a Seagate with perpendicular data for storage.

3 - You wont see much of an increase by use of the Raptor if you play a game that accesses from the Optical drives. The only improvement is for HDD based applications.

Are Raptors overpriced? Yes
Do they live up to the Hype? Yes
Is it worth it? Up to you, mate. In the end, I believe the max increase for any program on a Raptor is around 8-10%, but usually lower than that.

 

[ZOldDude]

no, ive never tried the perp ones.

these were just 7200rpm 16mb cacahe satas.

The new Seagate 7200.10 drives will read almost a full MBps faster than a Raptor. The 200GB size is about $100.

 

[col-p-todd]

This is a pretty easy question if you want peformance get the raptors if you want storage get the seagate. If you look at purely the gaming peformance the seagate can't match the Raptor.

You don,t ned any special wiring for raid, and it;s easy to set up.

 

[col-p-todd]

Here are some links

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2760

 

[plac]

Also, turn off the NCQ for faster times - the NCQ only improves multiple program access, making it a more fluid ramp up as more points attempt to access the discs.

thanks for the tip, ill look for that later today

 

[plac]

ok ok where do i find this NDQ setting?

I checked all my disks properties by right clicking...

the only thing that sounds close is the policies tab..

optimize for quick removal
optimize for performance

of course i have performance selected.

dont see NDQ anywhere.

disk jumper? bios?

 

[plac]

i found a post:

No, the ICH6R supports NCQ, the optional component of SATA-II. Since the Raptor isn't a native SATA drive (it's a PATA drive with an SATA bridge), it can't support NCQ, so it uses TCQ (the old PATA version, also used in recent IBM GXPs - not sure about the Hitachi 7K250).
TCQ isn't helpful in single user situations, perhaps because it invokes so much overhead. NCQ is said to be a lot more efficient, but it remains to be seen whether it really helps single user situations.
The Raptor won't get NCQ until it goes native SATA.

 

[plac]

i think i read that the new raptors (16mb) have NCQ as my properties show.. but the first generation dont have NCQ.

 

[plac]

awesome info! I just did a test on my raptor dual 74gb array.

I tried disabling read cache. My burst went up, but my access went down. I'll edit this w pics soon.

I'm trying disabling command queue first.

WITH READ CACHE AND NCQ ENABLED:

WITH READ CACHE DISABLED, BUT NCQ STILL ENABLED:

WITH READ CACHE AND NCQ BOTH DISABLED: (0% cpu??)

 

[Hoppy6698]

Good tests, dude. Matches the current articles from Maximum PC and PC Gamer that set up Raptor drives in two recent builds. One showed the Raptor X (16MB Cache) as averaging 140mb/s transfer rates, the other was not in a RAID, just as boot/OS drive, but showed ~ 75mb/s transfer speeds.

I guess where they truly shine is in a RAID setup.

Not to digress, but has anyone had issues installing an OS on RAID 0 setups? From the recent articles in Maximum PC and PC Gamer, I would take it that a RAID 0 almost doubles access speed to the HDDs.

 

[plac]

that 0% cpu in my last chart must be wrong right? how can it use zero cpu cycles?

 

[INeedCache]

I don't think the performance gain you get from the Raptor is worth the hit you take you space for the money. The Raptor is not the better overall value. But only you can decide based on how bad you want that small performance edge.

 

[Hoppy6698]

I don't think the performance gain you get from the Raptor is worth the hit you take you space for the money. The Raptor is not the better overall value. But only you can decide based on how bad you want that small performance edge.

I believe we all agreed on this point in the statements above. Raptors are performance only - akin to a Minivan vs. a sedan. The sedan is typically faster, but no one would argue that the Minivan is probably more efficient - for some people.

As I do not burn movies, play with DIVX, and only own about 15GB of music - the Raptor gives me a bigger kick and I suffer no lack of space, because I dont need it. If the time comes that I should need it, there are great drives such as the Seagate I can add in later.