Raptor x4

Hey, i was wonder if there are any performance benefits from running x4 74GB raptors vs x2? (besides the obvious more storage)

I found 2 'used' raptors going for $80 and another pair for $200 and i was thinking about buying them then combining them in RAID 0

are there any benefits?

Ah can you point me in there direction? and what Company is good? WD seagate?

Thanks so two in Raid 0 will really boost performance? or is one good enough?

Well im a huge gamer and i want the best performance, i dont have a problem i just want what will give the best performance, and is good pricewise.

Thanks for your help BTW!

Two Raptors in RAID 0 can be very fast! See one HDD can read and at the same time the other HDD can write to memory. While only one HDD can either read or write but not both at the same time. Raptors are very quick at access times at 10,000RPM's and just one 150GB Raptor is fast enough, but two would be blindingly fast!

A gamer is the last person that needs a 10k hard drive, I second the idea of a 7200.11, and if it loads half a second slower, who cares?

If you are a gamer and are building a new computer, just get the 500GB 7200.11. If you don't need 1TB, just get the single drive. As I said, gamers don't need excellent hdd specs. Spend your money on a fast CPU or GPU. Get a really good monitor, or a gaming mouse. Don't dump a bunch of money on something that won't effect your frame rates at all during game play, and only effects level loads a bit. Your money can be better spent.

I think you'll wanna read this
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] rite-heart

Not to start an argment but it really depends on what you are comparing. Seek time track to track is twice as fast as the 7200.11 however even though the Raptor 74 and 150 are spinning at 10,000 RPM the sustained transfer is only 84 MB/s compared to the 7200.11's 105 MB/s If you are loading big blocks of data as a game would I think it would be a tight race between the two drive brands. Unless the data are extremely fragmented then Seagate probably has the edge.

Until a reputable site like Tom's or Anand does a head to head, under lab conditions, price probably should be favored more. I think that the Perpendicular Recording Technology used by Seagate shows that horizontal bits are on the way out. The interface on the Seagates also supports 3GB/s for interface bursts while the Raptors are still stuck at 1.5GB/s. Most other spec's between the brands are about the same except for noise which as you would expect at a higher RPM the raptors are considerably noisier.

Also with Raid 0 interlacing the tracks there is not much time for read v. write when you are using multi-sector clusters at the file system/operating system level. As indepent drives that might become a factor but the same applies for Seagate. Unless you have a true controller with its own CPU and not the ones on the motherboard you are going to have a hard time matching stripe/block size to the file system cluster size. I am not a big fan of motherboard based raid controllers. There is a reason that good ones cost hundreds of dollars v. a less than 10 dollar in quantity chip.