I already have a 74GB Raptor, which I plan on using for the OS. I'm looking for a decently sized HD which has good performance for games. I've been looking through the stuff on Toms about HD's but I'm unsure as to the importance of each of the benchmarks. Its odd because most of the ones I saw I didnt see the Raptor coming out on top, and I always thought it was a really high performer, and justified its price. Although I did buy it 3 years ago.
So does anyone have any suggestions on a good decently sized HD?
I believe 150gb 10k Raptors still rule the roost when it comes to gaming, but it seems the 3/0 SATA's are a huge leap forward in HD's. Raptors I think (too lazy to lookup) halve the seek/write times of the 3/0's but it's milliseconds and 3/0 have larger capacities so just a trade-off.
Raptors were good when they first came to roost... but a few years on now the interface is old the technology isnt bleeding edge anymore. As ZeuSeason suggests the raptors generally halve the seek times but there sequential read/write speeds are significantly down on your run of the mill disks today.
Disk drives have very little impact on gaming (only foreseeable change is load times) so you will be better off getting a bigger disk rather than a faster one. Anything from WD or Seagate will suit you well with most of the Seagate desktop models the .11 generally fairs better than the .10. 400-500gb is the best $/gb value at the moment so id stick with that, should be more than enough to hold your games.
---------------
"The MB is 31 C and the CPU is 109 C. I think it's the CPU overheating." - Faromic THF's
If you are going to go with a 750gb I would look into a Samsung Spinpoint F1. $129.99 on newegg.
Edit:
I have 2 older Sata-150 74GB raptors here and benched them with HD-Tach. The samsung was faster in all but the seek obviously. Basic tests but here are the numbers I got. (long bench)
F1
Seek - 13.4 ms
Avg read - 83.2 mb/s
Burst - 219.8 mb/s
Again those are just quick benches and of course in the big picture there's a lot more going on but Raptors aren't that huge edge that they were years ago. The Seagate 7200.11's I hear are right around the F1's also but I don't have any here to test. That WD which is the AAKS is apparently fast also, the samsung sports a 32mb cache though. In the end a good 7200 vs a raptor gaming wise....you won't see it. I'm sure the newer 150 raptors put up better numbers (the ones I tested have a 2005 manufactured stamp on them) but I'm curious how much that seek time difference plays a role?
Edit:
My WD SE16 400GB
Seek- 13.6 ms
Avg read - 66.5 mb/s
Burst - 201.4 mb/s
Message edited by Unium on 04-14-2008 at 12:03:33 PM
