Search
Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Raptor 1600fdsd vs modern sata 2 drives

Last response: in Storage
Share

I recently got my hands on a old WD Raptor drive. It's the 1600ADFD which was a HP/Dell excursive at it's release many years ago. It's a 10k drive but is only SATA 1.5 compatible. I've been looking around for read write scores but all the reviews are (as you'd expect) really old. It seems internal write is around 85mb/s. I'm sure that's a lot higher than the Barracuda 7200.10 drives I currently have but my question is, are more modern drives faster?

I found this product: Hitachi 2TB 3.5" Deskstar Coolspin SATA-III 6GB/s Hard Drive - 5900rpm 32MB Cache - and even though it's only a 5900RPM drive, people reviewing it (on the sales website) are saying they get 100+mb/s out of it on Sata II connections. Can this be right, should I not bother with the old Raptor and get one of these instead?

To clarify, what I'm after is a fast boot drive I can store some Steam games on (for faster loading). I thank all in advance for their help and will ignore trolls :) 

Edit: the drive is a WD Raptor 1600ADFD not fdsd as I wrote in the title, sorry!

More about : raptor 1600fdsd modern sata drives

Register or log in to remove

I found this article which deals with the WD Raptor 1500:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2193/9

It compares the Barracuda 7200.10 drives I currently have and shows a clear advantage for the Raptor.

The article is still to old to really answer my original question though (it is from 2007) though it does elude to the 1tb Deskstar (@7200rpm) being close to matching the Raptor!

Perhaps those 100+mb/s results for the current generation Deskstar are correct. If anyone knows of some reviews that may show this please post links as these results may not translate into performance increases for game loading and boot up (W7).

Many thanks.
Storage Expert

I don't have benchie information on that raptor, but consider that most modern non-Green drives NEED the SATA II interface because they would be limited by an SATA I interface, and I am willing to bet that a run-of-the-mill current drive would beat that Raptor in performance.

Fast boot: SSD.

Less expensive fast boot: Current Raptor. The several-year-old Velociraptor that I have is still pretty snappy.
Related ressources
Ask the community

Cheers for your replies guys. @WyomingKnott, that logic is perfect and is a clear answer, I didn't realise current drives requires SATA II.

I agree with you both on SSD but I'm waiting on the inevitable price drop in the next 6 months. In the mean time I'm going to try this ageing Raptor and hope it can fill the gap between then and now. At least I know it's faster than these old Barracudas I'm currently using. :) 

The raptor will feel faster, it will have access time as compared to a 7200rpm drive from around the same time frame. Modern 7200k drives have approximately the same access time as the raptors used to with higher density platters.

Make sure that you have active cooling for the Raptor as they get rather hot especially when under load for long periods. I found with my old Raptors that they didn't offer much more than the later SATA 7200 offerings. Possibly you may get 20 MB a second more but not much more than that. The Velicoraptor competes well and will probably give you 50 MB a second more than the average SATA II 7200 RPM drive. One area you may wish to consider is that a SATA II 7200 RPM drive that is younger is probably going to be more reliable. Both my Raptors gave up the ghost after some years and the drive you propose using is already old in terms of years.

I just checked out the performance chart you referred to and that is not a stunning difference in performance. I wouldn't get to hung up on those specs.

! I just remembered how annoying it is re installing Windows, mainly due to all the game updates I'll have to re-do!!

Anyway..

From what you've all said it seems that the old Raptor is no substitute for a good modern 7200rpm sata 3Gb drive but that I would see a slight improvement over my old Barracudas (7200.10).

Based on this information I'm going to skip the 5900rpm drive mentioned above and use the Raptor in combination with 2 of my old Barracudas (as storage) as a stop gap till I can afford a 128gb SSD.

@ Wamphryi I've got a 12cm fan right next to my drive bay, do you think that will do for cooling?
Register or log in to remove
 
Ask the community
Read discussions in other Storage categories
!