It just seems not worth it at all when you look at the tiny amount of storage and mediocre increase compared to newer drives...I don't get the big buid up by the reviewers at all...

What are you looking for? Maybe you need a RAM drive.

It looks awesome to me.

It's even holding its own against 15K drives.
Sure, there are some tests that large 7200RPM drives are close, but no drive is consistantly able to compete.

And 300GB is not "Tiny".

The RAPTOR is not designed to be the primary data storage for all of your ripped Movies.

Furthermore, an "Enthusiast" drive is not designed to be inexpensive.
It's designed to meet high performance expectations.

That is certainly does.

It's just you.

I own 2 150GB Raptors.
I'd swap my 2 WD7500AAKS for another 2 Raptors in an instant.
But they are in my NAS full to the brim with archives.

I think the new Raptor is quite an improvement.

I do agree capacity wise it is a major improvement, and more testing will tell. Considering this is an enthusiast drive though, i'd expect a bigger demarcation between it and the commodity drives...

Personally, I would have preferred a drastic performance boost (by going 15K RPM or something) to doubling the capacity. Most of my data storage (movies, music, ...) would benefit more from RAID than Raptor anyway. But for OS and apps, what produces more random access, I probably need about 74-150GB max (and even 150GB seems to much).

Yes, its just you. A 15,000 speed would have been nice, but that would have brought heat problems and Raptors are already hot. This new package deals with the heat, doubles capacity, isn't much more expensive, and is faster in the benches. I'd like one myself. Besides, the one tested is an engineering sample and the retail derives might be even better. Of course, they could be a bit worse, but I'm optimistic on this.

I agree, it's just you. I was feeling disappointed that I *just* purchased a 150gb Raptor and now this comes out. 300 gigabytes is plenty for what I do, and the speed would be great.

I'm betting you bought that Raptor on sale, as most of them are being cleared out to make room for these new drives.

Going to 15K rpm would have increased the price a lot, I think.

Personally, I'm impressed with the new Raptor's numbers.

Unfortunately, no. I bought it three weeks ago and it was still full price.

Close enough to "just bought" for my purposes.

Smash it on the ground and take it back. Tell them that it exploded in your machine and you want a V-Raptor or you will sue.

Sorry if this is obvious but don't know much. Is the 15k cheetah drive still better or are they pretty close?

Ewwww.... $200 for only 37GB, and you also need to buy a SCSI controller...

I'd very much prefer to spend $300 on a 300GB Raptor. The numbers (as in, access times) are very close, but the size difference is just huge.


Edit: just in case you've never seen this theory before: a typical hard disk read or write goes like this:

1. wait for the heads to move to the right track - this is about the same for all modern drives, it doesn't depend on the rotation speed
2. wait for the track to rotate to the right sector - the cheetah will do great here with its high rotation speed
3. read/write the sector(s). If the disk is not very fragmented, this repeats for lots of adjacent sectors, and the speed depends mostly on data density. The raptor with its high density and PMR will do great here.

Which one wins depends a lot on how big the files are and how much fragmentation is there and on the kind of operation. For example in a random read/write of small files I'd bet on the Cheetah, but when dealing with a few large video files I'd bet on the V-Raptor.

Edit: to be fair to Seagate, that Cheetah is one of the most reliable drives ever. We don't really know how reliable the new Raptor will be.

What about SAS controllers and drives? you can get a 73.5gb, 15k sas cheetah for $160 then 130 for a decent controller. I would not recommend the lower cost controller, it would just slow the drive down, but spend about $200 on the controller and you are set up well for about $360. Which is likely what the VR will be when it first hits the shelves. One thing that I feel should be pointed out to is that your operating system should be on a drive of its own, so a smaller drive is actually better here, when I say smaller I mean around 64gb-150 or so.

Or you could partition a larger drive so the OS is on a C drive partition of around 100gb and all your data is on a D drive partition of whatever size.

Sailer,

That is true but the the same drive is still being accessed, as i understand your operating system is constantly sending and receiving. I am not sure of the whole concept so please excuse my lack of terms and true understanding. And only one thing can access a physical hard drive at a time. How I understand it to work is the drive is one platter and when one thing accesses it another cannot, so when the OP is accessing one thing another program cannot. Thus slowing down the system. The key point is that a partitioned drive still only has the one platter. Not sure if that helped my point or not, but that is the best I can explain it right now.

Seagate makes a 300 gig cheetah but I am guessing based on the above posts comparing the smaller one that the price for the 300 gig is way more. Price is always an issue but ignoring that for the moment, is the size what effects read/write that aevm is talking about or will raptor still out perform in that? Sorry if this is a noob question.

The best situation would be the OS on a separate drive, but a separate partition is the minimum. When my comp decided it didn't like XP anymore (I blame the Mobo, though it and the drive are still working fine after a reformat) and corrupted the OS, only my OS partition corrupted. Now, I think that this was a recoverable corruption (recovery programs could read it) but it still would have been a pain if I had to recover all my large movie and music files.