WD740GD Raptor - Replace time?

[mpasternak]

I currently use as my primary hard drive for installed applications and Windows, the WD740GD hard drive. Thats the 10,000 RPM 74gb Western digital drive, released in 2006. This is not a new hard drive by any stretch of the imagination, and has done me well through several builds. From Windows XP through Windows 7, from my Pentium 4 days till my current AthlonII x4.

But i'm beginning to wonder if it isn't the root of some serious bottlenecks. Gaming performance on my machine is where I expect it with the x4 and the 560ti.

But I feel like there's issues with load times. Windows takes what I feel is too long to load. I know 4gb isn't "high end" today, But its never full. There shouldn't be a lot of caching slowing me down. a few minutes load time for windows, and lengthy feeling load times for other applications just seems off.

Hard drive life checks all show its' in perfect health.

Is this drive just getting long on the tooth? are new drives, even the 7200 rpm variety just that much faster today that an upgrade would be worth it? Any benchmark comparisons with the RAPTOR and modern drives out there?

I would love and SSD. i can live with a smaller main partition for performance gains. But the price isn't quite there yet, which leaves me in the realm of platter based drives.

Any information, updates, or recommendations. Thank you kindly in advance.

 

[Chainzsaw]

Yes your raptor is getting long in the tooth. It's capacity is a measly 74GB (I actually used to own one).

Since the capacities of modern HDD's are 1-2 TB and more, and the "only" spin at 7200RPM. Even though it spins slower than your Raptor HDD, because of the arial density of the platters - they can sustain higher write/read speeds. Although the seek time of a 7200RPM will be slower than your 10k raptor.

Take a look here:

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/WD-VelociRaptor-600GB-Fastest-HD-Ever/?page=4

I know you don't own the 600GB version - but you can expect the performance to be way less than the 600GB.

But if your happy with your current set up, why change?