I have had a 36 GB WD raptor the original one, 360AD (i think) for 5 years. Since then it's been in 4 different computers, and now I'm starting my newest rig. My systems are all overclocked as much as possible, so processor/ram/gpu are all wicked fast. I'm looking for a hard drive, that seems to be the one performance cap I cant get over. I've done a bit of research and I'm not seeing much in the ways of hard drive performance.

Before anyone says anything (ONLY 36 GB?!?!), the system will be exclusively used for games and game design, so I don't care about average sustained read speeds, reliability, etc. I move the games to the raptor to play them. Does anyone know if anything new is coming? I've read up on solid state drives but for the price they're terrible.

I just can't believe that grandpa raptor is still king of the hill (unless a raptor X would be worth upgrading to...)

Edit:
One other thing I've been looking at is exotic means of achieving a faster rate by say, raiding compact flash cards or something, if anyone has any experience/info on that or something like it let me know.

WD is supposedly in the works for releasing a new version of the raptor though details are slim at the moment. My guess would be sometime in Q2 but who knows.

Have you looked in to RAID matrixing? I've seen some super fast I/O times for some of the newer drives with the outermost portion of the platters set to a RAID 0 partition (with the remaining space as Raid 1 for data security).

Well, If you want, you can get a nice RAID system with Samsung SpinPoint F1s or Seagate 7200.11. The spinpoints have a sustained read speed of 90MB/s and 7200.11 get 81MB/s. a RAID 0 of 4 of those would be equal to that of 2 new raptors. With the exception of seek time, i believe the 4 7200rpm raid setup is faster.

Another option for Extreme performace would be a RAM drive. Gigabyte sells a product called I-RAM or something like that where you place RAM chips into a PCI (or maybe pci -e) card. That would serve as a hard drive. Transfer rates are phenomial and seektime is close to zero. Something liek that would beat a flash drives and raptors. However, make sure the battery one the device has juice, no battery = quick format ;-)

What do you think about striping 2 of these little 2.5" SAS's?
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applica [...] &CatId=135
-----------
Capacity (GB): 73
Interface: Serial Attached SCSI
Spindle Speed (RPM): 10K
Buffer Memory: 16MB
Average Seek (msec): 3.9
Average Latency (msec): 3.0
Track-to-Track Seek Time (typical read, ms): 0.4
Maximum External Transfer Rate (Mbits/sec): 300

http://techreport.com/articles.x/9312
sweet!

Personally, I believe the best you could do at this point if you aren't interested in a flash drive (the new OCZ relabeled Samsung drive) would be one of the new 150 raptors. You'll give up some on data transfer speed, but you would make it back on access time.

Don't know if you ever look at storagereview.com, but I like it, even though it seem to have fallen off quite a bit the last couple years. Just check out the benchmark database and have a look at what it says. They (He, actually, I believe) have always run the best and most impartial tests of anyone on the net that I have seen.

The Raptor's been through 4 or 5 revisions and speed has gone up while reliability has gone down. The Raptor's reliability is way down in the 12% percentile over at storagereview.com. But a new Raptor will be faster than an old one. However all Raptor's pale against the Samsung F1 and Seagate 7200.11's. The Raptos still has a faster access time which is great for databases (lots of accesses to small files), but game loads generally involve large file loads....and the bigger 32 MB cache's on the new Seagate and Samsung models has another large impact.

The F1's based upon Samsung's newer 320 GB platter are the fastest drives around peaking out with read DTR's of 118 Mb/s. So if you picking the 320, 640 or 1 TB models, they would be your speed kings though I can't get the math on 3 platters x 320 GB = 1,000 GB's.

At the 500 and 750 GB size, ya can't make those outta the Samsing Hi density 320 GB platters, those must be using the older lower density 250 GB platters, so I'd lean towards the Seagate's in that size range.

You can compare the Raptors with these drives here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] page9.html

Max DTR's:
Samsung - 118.7
Seagate 7200.1 - 100.3
WD7500 - 96.2
Raptor 740 - 87.0

As for the SSD'd Dell, ATM, is denying customer return rates of 20-30 % based upon poor performance.
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2 [...] te_drives/

The best you can do to eliminate the HD bottle neck is go SCSI. As can be shown here, RAID just isn't all it's cracked up to be for single user performance:

"Though evidence has been presented to the contrary, a combination of overzealous marketing as well as general lack of knowledge has resulted in the proliferation of RAID among power users running single-user workstations. While considerable argument may be made for the redundancy provided by RAID1, the increase in transfer rates and high-I/O random access performance delivered by RAID0 simply do not benefit most non-server uses."


http://forums.storagereview.net/wi [...] iveVsRaid0

"Unsurprisingly, the dual-drive RAID 0 solution delivers double the sequential transfer rate of a single unit. The SR Office, High-End, and Gaming DriveMarks, however, all climb by less than 10%. Also consider the fact that the RAID array boasts double the capacity of the single drive: as a result, some of that performance increase we see between the single drive and the RAID array simply comes from the larger capacity and resultant shorter actuator travel distances."

SR Gaming DriveMark:
Single Drive - 519 IO/sec
Two Drives (RAID 0) - 529 IO/sec

While you will see significant increases in boot time and benchmarked DTR, that's only a 1.9% increase in gaming performance.