Two 74GB WD raptors 75$ a good price?

[paul2083]

I have the opportunity to buy two 74 gb 10k Raptors from a friend for 75$. I currently use a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar <16 mb cache> as my system drive and my mobo is a 680i SLI EVGA. Is this a good idea? Would Raid 0 give me better boot times? I currently am using Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit 90 day trial while i wait for my upgrade disc.

 

[geofelt]

I think you will be disappointed. The 74gb raptors have a maximum data transfer rate of 72 mb/sec.
Your deskstar is 121, and is about as good as it gets.
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php

Raid-0 might help some, but it generally does not, except for sequential data transfer operations.

A quality SSD is the way to go today.

 

[megamanx00]

Hey, for that price I think it's worth it if you run them in RAID 0. Your boot times will be better as will some of your loading times as you will be running your system files with the Raptors in Raid 0. Don't expect it to be too dramatic though, but I think the improvement is worth $75

 

[tehHooligan]

save your $75 and use it to get a nice ssd, you wouldn't believe how much faster a system runs with it. My intel X25-M beats the crap out of a 5 drive seagate barracuda raid 0 that I set up at one point. I've been converted, you will too.

 

[505090]

raptors are done save your money

first there are several 7200 drives that outperform it in every category
second they have already been used for how many years, putting old drives into raid 0 is begging for a raid failure.

 

[jitpublisher]

Have to agree here. The old Raptors are not worth much, he could probably get that much out of them on eBAy, but to a "friend" certainly not $75.
The only advantage I would see is if he would let them go for about $40, take 1 of them and load your OS on it, use it just for that only. Put everything else on your current drive. Put the other Raptor away in case the one you are using ever dies.
I wouldn't put them in RAID just to load the OS.