WD Raptor worth the price?

[Track]

For my next build im looking at buying a faster HDD to speed up things and the Raptor 10,000 RPM HDD cought my eye.

The problem with the Raptor for me is that it has too little space. I thought at first of installing all my games on the Raptor and then using a 7,200 RPM HDD for the rest of my stuff.
But I dont want to be limited to only installing a few games everytime, seeing as I cant afford the 150GB model, but only the 74GB.

So my question is - would the Raptor really give me a significant performance boost in games and load times, or should i just install the games on the 7,200 RPM because the performance and load times will be about the same?

Thnx!

 

[Syntonic]

If you are worried about price, then I'd have to say no. Other system components would probably solve any outstanding speed issues you might have far better. It could be that how you use your computer (outside of gaming) may justify buying one though. If you could afford both, that would have been far more ideal as a tiered approach is the way to go but mainly, for home usage, it's far more of a luxury.

 

[cattbert]

I am not sure what kind of prices you were finding for the Raptors, but BestBuy has a deal right now on the 150 GB Raptor X ... $169.99 with no rebates:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?ref=39&loc=01&http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp%3fskuId=7821949&type=product&id=1142294266684

It shows it as backordered 1-2 weeks online, but if you are not in a rush it is a good deal ... or you can look to see if it is in stock locally. As to the speed advantage over the 7,200 hard drives, I was surprised to see how close the Seagate 320 GB perpendicular drive was to the raptor in Anand Tech's actual application performance test:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2920&p=10

and you can get the Seagate at TigerDirect for $79.99 after a $20 rebate right now:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?Sku=TSD-320AS&AffiliateID=Es5Ekr9eEBk-JZ0dvhhCqOu7hp.xRcA.Aw

or if you do not want to deal with the rebate, it is only $94.99 w/ free s&h at newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140

 

[Track]

Sorry, cant shop in the US.

If anything, ill buy a 250GB 7,200 RPM HDD and a 74GB 10,000 RPM HDD.

It just makes me kind of eratated that im buying this huge 250GB HDD and i cant use it for games and ill have to try and fit all of my games on that tiny 74GB HDD..

I originally wanted a 10,000 RPM HDD for windows to boot more quickly, but if my games can load more quickly, i guess i Have to put them on the Raptor..

 

[hergieburbur]

I have a 36GB Raptor that I use just for my OSes and programs that really benefit from the speed boost, and a 320 GB perpendicular 7200 RPM drive for my data and other programs. I have been very satisfied with my decision.

A lot of games won't benefit much from moving to the Raptor, depending on the type of games you play. You should have more than enough space to keep the games you play the most/benefit the most on the Raptor drive and put the other data on a separate drive.

 

[fate0n3]

If you are looking for fast HD setup I would recommend running a Raid 0 setup. You will get more hard drive space and save yourself some money and still get some fast speeds. I would highly recommend picking yourself up

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148144 x2

and running them in a RAID 0 they are 16mb cache drives and Sata2 connection.

 

[hergieburbur]

You have to be careful about using RAID 0. While you gain speed on your drives, you also drastically increase your chances for a failure that results in loss of data.

Further, its generally not a good idea to use RAID 0 array for your OS drive.

 

[fate0n3]

Fault in hard drives are the same weather the drives are single or in raid if a single drive goes out you lose all your data if, if a hard drive in raid 0 goes out you lose all your data so in my personal opinion it doesn't really change anything. Now i have read many places that drives in RAIDS sometimes have a higher fault prone. Not at all sure about this info i can not back it up with any proof or evidence. Now why would you not want to install it on the OS drive? Raid really doesn't show much advantage gaming wise. All sites i could find show RAID having huge advantages during OS boot, installation, and program install (somewhat on the last one). On all most all sites i could find game performance did increase a SMALL amount.

 

[hergieburbur]

Fault in hard drives are the same weather the drives are single or in raid if a single drive goes out you lose all your data if, if a hard drive in raid 0 goes out you lose all your data so in my personal opinion it doesn't really change anything.Now i have read many places that drives in RAIDS sometimes have a higher fault prone. Not at all sure about this info i can not back it up with any proof or evidence.

You are wrong here, but maybe you don't understand what I mean. You are correct about the chance for a fault in the HD being the same, but wrong about the chances/amount of data loss when compared to RAID 0. If you have 200 GB spread equally on two separate 120GB drives and one of them dies, you lost 100 GB. If you have the same 200GB on the same drives in a RAID 0 array and one drive fails, you have lost 200Gb data, so the potential data loss is higher. Also, in the case of a single drive failure, it is sometimes possible to recover your data using a relatively cheap software recovery tool (I have personally done this several times). In RAID 0, this is not possible without very expensive recovery efforts.

Further, RAID setups are more prone to faults. You are introducing another link (the controller), which is an additional failure point, so you must factor the failure rate of the controller along with the two drives, as compared to two drives alone. With Redundant RAID arrays such as 1 or 5, this is not a problem because you can rebuild the array, but not with RAID 0.

Some also claim that HDs connected to some cheaper controllers are more subject to data corruption and failure, but I have not personally seen this to be true.

Now why would you not want to install it on the OS drive? Raid really doesn't show much advantage gaming wise. All sites i could find show RAID having huge advantages during OS boot, installation, and program install (somewhat on the last one).

This is more of a personal preference stemming from my experience in business computing environments, but for several reasons:
The OS makes constant small read/write calls back to the disk. RAID 0 performs best with larger file transfers and other than at boot time and several other cases (Installation of the OS is usually limited by the CD-ROM), the OS will not benefit much during normal operations.The constant access by the OS creates additional overhead for the RAID array and generally works against the goal of increasing speed for data transfers.As I mentioned before, RAID 0 works best with applications that demand larger, fast file transfers, which the OS is not, so its a waste of resources. Why go through the potential chance of a RAID failure scrapping your PC when you can keep your OS on a separate drive?

On all most all sites i could find game performance did increase a SMALL amount.

Another reason why I recommended AGAINST using RAID 0. You are the one who initially recommended it, and now you are pointing out its limited benefits, especially when compared to cost, in this situation.

This is not to say that you should never use RAID 0, as there are alot of valid applications for it. This just isn't one of them.

 

[irrsh]

That happened to me! It wasn't pretty and the performance boosts weren't easy seen. If you have the money get a raptor drive or the 750Gb seagate. That seagate has been doing extremely well on the benchmarks all around and their prices are coming down! At CES 2007 hitachi announced that they were coming out with a 1 Tb hard drive with a price tag of 350. Its a few months away but if you can wait for just a little while I think you will get a bigger bang for your buck!

 

[dropadrop]

I had a raptor 150, but didn't feel it was so special. Sure things got a bit snappier, but I forgot about it very soon. All in all one of the sillier things I wasted my money on (but still not in the top 5 )

 

[hergieburbur]

... Sure things got a bit snappier, but I forgot about it very soon...

Not saying whether you should get one or not, but that is human nature. We perceive things by their contrast to other things. Hence the speed increase becomes less noticeable over time. Its the same concept as how hot water feels less hot over time even though its the same temperature.

... Just because you forgot about it doesn't mean it slowed down.

 

[Track]

Ok, good points here..

Raid 0 - I dont know anything about that, but i already have a 250GB HDD from WD, can i buy another one and link them up? Will it make a 7,200 RPM HDD as fast as a 10,000 RPM HDD or is it another kind of "fast"?

My problem is that I dont want to feel constricted to the Raptor. I dont want to have to make the decision every time about "should i put this in the raptor or not", and then feel really bad everytime i boot it from the 7,200 RPM HDD because ill know that its the slower one..
I guess i have the oposite problem of forgetting that the Raptor is fast, because ill never be able to forget it and it iwll keep haunting me!
Media and such will be fine on the 250GB, but well.. idk, this issue is starting to bug me..
The whole reason i wanted this was because i thought that it might be a little faster, but now i feel like im expecting too much out of it and its making me not want to buy it..

So i really dont know anymore.. ive seen benchmarks where the game loaded up 10 seconds faster on the Raptor, and that IS worth something, but i dont want to feel bad everytime i boot a game up from the 250GB..

 

[hergieburbur]

For your first question, yes, as long as its the same capacity (and same maker usually). It will be a different kind of fast than the Raptor.

My advice if you are agonizing over the decision this much is to buy a high quality Seagate perpendicular drive with a low seek time. I have one and I definitely notice the difference between that and my old 120GB 7200 RPM drive. The Raptor is faster, and I think each size step has been faster than the smaller ones, but I think your expectations are very high and, especially if the Raptor is very expensive where you are, you may be disappointed by it when you get it.

As I said though, I have been happy with my Raptor, but I got a good price on it, and its only the 36GB model.

 

[Track]

But then how do u choose where to place ur stuff - on the tiny Raptor or on the Segate?

And what do u mean low seek times?

Oh, and i can really just buy another WD 250GB 8M 3.5" SATA2 HDD and link them up in order to achieve... something?

 

[hergieburbur]

Personally, I put the OS and any programs that have to be on the OS drive on the Raptor (keep in mind I have 2 or 3 OSes on it at any given time). Everything else goes on one of the other two drives I have, depending on desired performance.

Seek time and latency are additional measures of HD performance, along with RPM. Seek time is how long on average it takes to find the data you want. Many drives are 8.9ms or 9+. The drive I have is around 8.5 ms.

As a comparison, here is the Large drive I have: Seagate 7200.10

and the Raptor I have.

Before any tells you differently, there is no real difference between the SATA 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps transfers speeds.

For your last question, yes, and no. It depends on your motherboard. If your MB supports RAID 0, then you can buy another drive and set them up in a RAID 0 configuration, but you will have to wipe the drive and start from scratch to do so, and either your MB has to supoprt RAID, or you need an add-on RAID controller card.

 

[pshrk]

I would go with the 74GB raptor, I think you will have plenty of room for games.

I usually partition my hard drive so that the partition that windows is installed on is no bigger than 80G. This is good for hard drive performance, and defragmantation where it counts the most is quicker and needs to be done much less often. There are probably other reasons too that I'm forgetting... I currently have xp pro x64, 5 games (Prey, battlefield 2142, UT2004, MoH, FEAR, and FEARXP) , office full, acrobat pro, visual studio 2005 full, a couple of gigs in my documents, drivers, virus scanner, and other apps and still have about 40G/75G free.

Anyway, if it was me I would go with your original plan 74G raptor for windows and games and a cheap 7200rpm drive for all of your music, movies, downloads, etc...

 

[croc]

Short answer, don't waste your money. I am sure that the long answer will involve reading a number of posts.

 

[dropadrop]

... Sure things got a bit snappier, but I forgot about it very soon...

Not saying whether you should get one or not, but that is human nature. We perceive things by their contrast to other things. Hence the speed increase becomes less noticeable over time. Its the same concept as how hot water feels less hot over time even though its the same temperature.

... Just because you forgot about it doesn't mean it slowed down.

The more important thing is that I didn't notice an annoying difference when I sold the drive and switched back to a normal 7200rpm model.

 

[Track]

Personally, I put the OS and any programs that have to be on the OS drive on the Raptor (keep in mind I have 2 or 3 OSes on it at any given time). Everything else goes on one of the other two drives I have, depending on desired performance.

Seek time and latency are additional measures of HD performance, along with RPM. Seek time is how long on average it takes to find the data you want. Many drives are 8.9ms or 9+. The drive I have is around 8.5 ms.

As a comparison, here is the Large drive I have: Seagate 7200.10

and the Raptor I have.

Before any tells you differently, there is no real difference between the SATA 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps transfers speeds.

For your last question, yes, and no. It depends on your motherboard. If your MB supports RAID 0, then you can buy another drive and set them up in a RAID 0 configuration, but you will have to wipe the drive and start from scratch to do so, and either your MB has to supoprt RAID, or you need an add-on RAID controller card.

I have an nForce 680i SLi motherboard.
Can u explain to me what the benefits of Raid 0 are?

Why is there no difference beetween 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps? I was looking forward to 6.0 Gbps.

My main question is - how do u decide with programs and files go on the faster HDD? Wouldnt it be nice if a video file could load faster? I hate being selective in a way that has significant control over my happiness and enjoyment.

 

[hergieburbur]

You should be able to do RAID0,1, and possibly 1+0 or 5 with no problem.

RAID0 works by striping data across two disks, so that basically instead of pulling data from one disk, it is coming from two disks at a time. For more information on RAID 0 and the other versions, check out this wikipedia entry on RAID.

Personally, I would only use RAID 5 or 10 if I were going to go the RAID route, but that would take at least 3 disks.

There is a difference between the 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps transfer standards, but in practice there is no difference because the lower standard is still faster than the sustained data transfer rate of the drives available today.

As for which programs to put on a faster HD, it depends on whether you are using RAID or not. In RAID 0, video files and other large files will load much faster, but it also comes with the added risk I described above. On a non-RAID setup, if you have a 150GB Raptor that has the space, I would put as much as I can on it. Without that, I would put the larger files on the second drive, and put files where speed is especially important or smaller files that can fit on the Raptor.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you have. You have to keep in mind, that it is definitely not worth agonizing over, or letting it affect your happiness.

 

[Track]

As for which programs to put on a faster HD, it depends on whether you are using RAID or not. In RAID 0, video files and other large files will load much faster, but it also comes with the added risk I described above. On a non-RAID setup, if you have a 150GB Raptor that has the space, I would put as much as I can on it. Without that, I would put the larger files on the second drive, and put files where speed is especially important or smaller files that can fit on the Raptor.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you have. You have to keep in mind, that it is definitely not worth agonizing over, or letting it affect your happiness.

Thats just how i am.. i get too attached to "things".

So large files do better on the Raid 0 and smaller files do better on the 10,000 RPM? Are the 10,000 RPM and the Raid 0 7,200 RPM about the same speed or is one faster?
I want to know what would be faster - Raid 0 7,200 or non-Raid 0 10,000.
And what would Raid 0 10,000 be like?

What files should go on the Raid 0 and what on the 10k?

 

[hergieburbur]

The smaller files don't necessarily do better on the 10K RPM drive, they would just to better on the Raptor than RAID0 due to the lower seek and access times.

As for speed, I think the RAID0 array if they are decent drives will be a bit faster than the Raptor, but I can't remember. I know they did an article here on Tom's about a year ago comparing the two. It should still be aout there if you search for Raptor or RAID. That would be more informative than I am.

RAID 0 10K (2 Raptors), is really fast, but also very expensive. I think you could do a SCSI RAID array including the controller for about the cost of two 150GB Raptors (around $500 US).

As for which files go where, I would put large files such as vids on the RAID array, programs such as productivity suites (open Office, etc) on the Raptor, and games that generally have long load times on the array.

 

[Track]

Alright, well I did some reading on the subject and ive looked at some reviews.
It appears that RAID 0 makes everything go a lot faster. A 7,200 RPM drive in RAID 0 is as fast or faster than the Raptor 8MB, but still not as fast as the new Raptor X with 16MB.

So would u reccomend I buy another WD 250GB HDD and have 500GB of speed or just a Raptor 74GB 8MB and have 74GB of speed and 250GB of slowness? Note that the 74GB raptor costs more than twice as much as another 250GB.

thnx again!

 

[croc]

Your money... Spend it wisely.

My 2p.