10,000 rpm HD... were they ever worth it?

SSDs make 10k RPM drives almost pointless. I have own 2 generations of WD Raptors and they were great for what they were. My oldest one still works (about 7 years old).
The Crucal M4 series continues to be the benchmark for what a model SSD should be: cheap, fast, and reliable

Looking back I can say with certainty that they were not worth the premium. Before the HD crash and things went haywire with the prices you could buy 2 good high volume 7200rpm drives, raid them, and get better performance for much less money.

Today I would jump on an SSD if building new....... depending on price. Reasonably big HD for secondary. And saying that I still think the SSD's are too high.

Tell me that after you own one.

I'd say that in the consumer market, no. But it's different in the business arena, where you've got 10k and 15k SAS drives that are (from what I hear from my dad) cheap enough at the moment.

I've had Raptor HDs in my PC since the first gen: 2x 37GB RAID, game those away to my brother when the 74GBs came out for another RAID setup. The 2 74GBs died like 4 years after getting them (almost same time!) and I got them replaced no questions asked... 1 came back as a Raptor X with NCQ and not too long after that the other one WD sent me a Velociraptor of 150GB lol.

Pre-SSD, nothing could touch Raid 0 Raptors in SATA/PATA, but they can't hold a candle to today's SSD speeds. I've never had a big need for space, pure performance is always what I've gone for.

I would never buy one today; noisy, hot & too expensive, but the Velociraptor still has games I don't play TOO often on it; while my other 2 SSDs are OS/Apps & Games

lot of money for a few ram chips, a controller and some software.

If sequential reads/writes are all you are after then yes.

If it as access times, I do not think 2 7200rpm drives beat out the raptor for access times. Sure if you short stroke them, you should get some closer access times. I even took a 2tb Seagate and short stroked it to 300gigs(first 100 for windows last 200 for files) with good results for older computers.

Access times are the selling point of raptors. SSD's just destroyed everything in access times.

Even 3 short stroked 7200rpm drives do not push past a cheap 64gig SSD in most thing because of the access time dependence on many everyday computer tasks.

You always have to balance space with speed, so I still use FAR more hard drives then SSD's and will for some time, but those prices get better every day.


Do you remember when a 40 gig hard drive was like 200+ bucks. Yeah technology prices drop.

some good points taken. forgot some of the "old" stuff...... like noisy, hot, high priced......... and lets not forget the hardware that used to have to run these........ p4's/939's etc. All that weighed on these back in the day... and not too long ago. I'm still happy with a couple of 500" in raid. Save money over the raptor and their small storage space.

10K / 15K SCSI / SAS drives are for the enterprise server world, they make nearly no sense on the consumer level (old school Raptor setup aside). Price per-GB of space is still too large on SSD's for them to be a primary form of storage, though some places are switching to them. The common technique amongst enterprise is to use a tiered storage setup, Tier 1 is a bank of SSD's used for data / systems that absolutely must be accessed. Tier II is several banks of 10~15K SAS drives, much larger then Tier 1 and provides for most of your enterprise data needs. Tier III is several more banks of 7200K large capacity SAS/SATA drives, this is where you put very low priority data and where you backup your previous data tiers to.

So to answer the OP's question, no they were never worth it for home use.