to raptor or not to raptor? that is the question!

[Easy Rhino]

so what should i do? ive got the seagate barracuda as my main drive. it works well and everything. but i think i want to get a raptor because its faster and apparently games run better on it. so i guess id run the seagate as the main drive and have the raptor secondary. no raid or anything because obviously that would be pointless between those two drives. however, what if i just get a second seagate drive and put them in raid 0 ? that is a cheaper alternative but will it be as fast?

[Namslas90]

Two baracudas in Raid 0, Striping, would be faster than a single drive. But two Raptors would be better. They must be identical, and your mobo must support raid or you will need a raid card.

[AthlonX2]

i love my raptor,my computer boots so much faster now i see the windows boot logo for 2 seconds the little blue bar never makes it to the other side to cycle,but i have alot of services turned off and no startup items either...but i would probably go with the raid barracudas over a single raptor

[Aevum]

boot time is more dependent on how you finetune services and boot up programs,

raid is still better value for money, raptors have the worst storage/$ ratio ever,
what i tell people who want a raptor is to buy a 38gb or a 76gb raptor split it in to a main partition and a 2nd 5-10gb partition for swapfile, use that for operating system and primary use programs, then buy a 250-500gb barracuda or WD caviar SE for general use and storage,

a reason to get the 76 is that the original 38GB raptor dosnt have NCQ and is a SATA I 150 drive, you still wont get 150MB/sec off the SATA II version, but some people like to have NCQ and hope for higher peak performance on the SATA II drives

[AthlonX2]

i have the 74gb raptor and its SATA 150 as well im not sure what NCQ is for so i dont notice much performance increase

[noneed4me2]

I am thinking of getting the 74gb Raptor and making it my boot drive and relegate my 250gb drive strictly for storage. I can do raid but i prefer seperate drives for backup since I only have room for 2. Portable hard drives are dirt cheap right now so I suggest maybe get a raptor now and raid it later with another when it is affordable. I use my old 160gb Barracuda in an enclosure and do backups that way but i have a rather large amount of MP3s and various movies and software that i like to keep seperate on a different partition for now and on the portable for extra protection.

[Easy Rhino]

good info

[Dippyskoodlez]

Although, if you are storing data you reaaaly dont need to be willing to lose, I would suggest atleast raid 0+1 if you can.

[Prince_Ithilien]

i agree with Namslas90 100%.

[b1lk1]

This topic has been beaten to death around here and then some. For the absolute best speed, raptors are about 10-20% faster in raid than normal drives. To me they are not worth it as I can get my raid 0 within 5-10% of the speed of raptors since I do routine system maintainence and keep the clutter to a minimum. Are raptors worth the extra? Definitely not to me. If you have the extra to spend, they sure are nice. The 150GB drives are the only ones I'd even think of getting. 2 Sata 2 drives in a raid 0 that are properly maintained will give you pretty much the same results. If you search around this forum, you will find 2-3 very large threads with all the info you need.

[Alec§taar]

Originally Posted by b1lk1

This topic has been beaten to death around here and then some.

I'll agree on that, 110%... it's a tough one, because like other parts, disks are a 'strange mixture' of things, & it really depends on what you want to see & how you use your disks & for what tasks.

There's seek/access speeds, bootup times, & loads of data to consider... each disktype (Raptor 10k rpm disks vs. say, SATA II Perpendicular Recording disks), offers benefits in those areas over the other imo.

Raptors WILL give you a wicked fast bootup (& faster if you tune out services you don't need etc.) & fast file finds (because you first have to locate a file to open it, read/write it, close it), but perpendicular recording SATA II drives have better READ speed results (which might give you a gain loading say, large files &/or game data).

Perfect disk, imo? Give me a Perpendicular Recording Technology disk w/ 10,000rpm revolution rates...

Originally Posted by b1lk1

The 150GB drives are the only ones I'd even think of getting.

Which is the route I took, in addition to running them off a 128mb ECC RAM caching controller w/ it's own I/O subprocessor, to offload system CPU usage... in RAID 0.

Did the best, overall, in our HDTach tests here... but it cost a lot. Worth it to me, largely because programming work entails a LOT of disk oriented I/O!

It really ALL depends on what you want to do, & yes, costs involved. I think disks are the HARDEST part to make decisions on nowadays.

APK