Velociraptor

When I see the word Velociraptor I think of the word waste of money.
To much for so little.
More status than worth
Dell with a coupon code is selling 1TB seagates with 32MB of cache for about $100 put 2 of them in a raid 0 and have a huge drive.
With their sata one interface and 16BM cache they are not that much faster.
If you really want fast and cheap, 2 Seagate 640GB 32MB cache drives in raid 0 come close to the overpriced vraptors, and beat the raptors.

Good selection of a motherboard, stay the hell away from Asus, their RMA service sucks.

Your better off 2 WD 640 blacks in raid 0, way less money, and lots more space, and faster then 1 Velociraptor.

angelsfanatic, since you can afford it, go with the Velociraptor. Two 150GB Velociraptor in RAID0 will be faster, but the risk of data loss also is higher than a single 300GB Velociraptor.

The VelociRaptor by itself will destroly any other computer HDD, even if they are in RAID-0.

RAID-0 will help some, but the gain is normally not huge.
I would go for the single 300GB, but RAID-0 would be slightly faster.

The only thing faster would be some of the better SSD Drives.
Intel has one starting at about $500, but its still rather small and twice as expensive. The lesser expensive SSDs tend to have massive issues with multiple writes that bring the drive to a literal halt.

It's all a matter of what your doing and how much your willing to spend. Raid will win in specific applications but in general usage you would be better of with the velociraptor. If you want more performance step up to a SSD from either mtron or memoright, but that is gonna cost you dearly.

For reference Western Digital does not support caviar drives in a raid array. The ONLY drives supported in an raid array are the RE's.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std...

Just my 2 cents
Go figure that the only drives made for raid are enterprise class drives maybe because an enterprise environment is the only place raid has a viable application.

I have two 150 gig raptors in raid0 striped. They are fast obviously, but i barely notice the diff between them and my one seagate I use for storage. I think the only time you would ever really notice any speed diff is if you were doing some huge spooling like graphic editing or something. Go with whatever is cheaper.

IS there a difference between 150 GB and 300 GB velociraptor in terms of speed?

Nope.

There is a huge difference 36, 75, and 150GB are "raptor's", which are now obsolete as a caviar black has similar performance at an infinitely better price/gb ratio. The 300GB is the only velociraptor which dominates all ide/sata drives except a few SSD's notably mtron and memo right.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

there are 2 version, i believe the one that is sold out is better

my apologies didn't realize there was a 150GB velociraptor

the old raptors were small, you raid them, you can create a backup image onto a single larger drive. if you raid 2x1TB drives, or even 2x1.5TB drives, you have no reasonable way to backup your data if you stripe them. When one drive fails, you just lost everything. 2 velociraptors in a RAID 0, with a 1 TB drive just for storing a backup image of the raid using Ghost or whatever backup utility you want allowing you to restore it would make the most sense. For further reference : the initial cost of the velociraptors is more than the cost of striping 4 conventional drives which would produce phenomenal performance

Damn skippy, this is the way to go!

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=Single...
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.
That site also has a performance database where you can compare the performance if a bunch of different drives, including the 15k server drives. The velociraptor shows up very well. Look for the SRdrivemark2006 tests which probably resemble what a single user would do on his desktop. The synthetic tests from HDtach and HDtune are misleading in predicting real world performance.

The 300gb velociraptor is a bit faster because there is more data under the faster outer parts of the drive.

I am very happy with my 300gb velociraptor. It's quiet too.

The only SSD to consider is the INTEL drive at about $600 fot 80gb. It's controller seems to be the only one that avoids some write problems.

I appreciate all the posts and information. I have to say from experience that Raptors in RAID 0 do make a difference. I have run a couple of Seagate 320GB SATA drives in RAID 0 and I am currently running 3 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 and the difference is quite noticeable.

My question really was if there is a big difference between the 300GB Velociraptor and 2 150GB Raptors in RAID 0. I have read that the 300 GB Raptor will hold it's own against 2 older Raptors in RAID 0, but I haven't really seen it compared to 2 150Gb Velociraptors in RAID 0. I will be doing a lot of photo retouching and manipulation in Photoshop CS4 as well as some light gaming so I am not really sure which way to go. I am also reconsidering my CPU choice, but I will start a forum about that in the appropriate section.

Current system; XFX 780i SLI, Intel Core 2 E8400 @3.6GHZ(9 x 400 fsb), 4GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer PC26400 RAM, XFX 8800GTS XXX Ed. 512, Thermaltake 750 Watt Toughpower, 3 74GB WD Raptors in RAID 0, 1 Seagate 320GB for storage, all wrapped up in a Thermaltake Armor case.

In case anybody is wondering, I am building a system for my son using these components once my new one is built. I am not building a new system to build just to build one.