Should I get a Raptor Drive?

[Talal Itani]

Hello,

I am putting together a quality performance PC. A good Asus motherboard,
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 800 DDR2 memory. I am thinking about a Raptor drive,
but I never used a PC with a Raptor drive, so I do not know if it is worth
the extra Dollars. Do you recommend the Raptor, over a standard 7000 RPM
drive?

Best Regards,
T.I.

 

[WannaKatana]

Hello,

I am putting together a quality performance PC. A good Asus motherboard,
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 800 DDR2 memory. I am thinking about a Raptor drive,
but I never used a PC with a Raptor drive, so I do not know if it is worth
the extra Dollars. Do you recommend the Raptor, over a standard 7000 RPM
drive?

Best Regards,
T.I.

From everything I've read, yes.

Joel

 

[Cessna 310]

Hello,

I am putting together a quality performance PC. A good Asus motherboard,
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 800 DDR2 memory. I am thinking about a Raptor drive,
but I never used a PC with a Raptor drive, so I do not know if it is worth
the extra Dollars. Do you recommend the Raptor, over a standard 7000 RPM
drive?

Best Regards,
T.I.

Depends on your apps and how you use your computer. If you do much that
requires disc access, there will be a difference.

I didn't see much difference in boot time, but program load times and
file access times were noticeably improved when I switched to a Raptor
1500ADFD a couple of months ago.

I would not go with the smaller versions.

 

[Cessna 310]

Depends on your apps and how you use your computer. If you do much that
requires disc access, there will be a difference.

I didn't see much difference in boot time, but program load times and
file access times were noticeably improved when I switched to a Raptor
1500ADFD a couple of months ago.

I would not go with the smaller versions.

I should have mentioned that I also have a WD 320gb SE16 as a second
drive. I have the page files and some data files on that drive.

 

[GT]

Hello,

I am putting together a quality performance PC. A good Asus motherboard,
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 800 DDR2 memory. I am thinking about a Raptor drive,
but I never used a PC with a Raptor drive, so I do not know if it is worth
the extra Dollars. Do you recommend the Raptor, over a standard 7000 RPM
drive?

How about a matching pair of Samsung Spinpoint or Western Digital 7200 hard
drives in a RAID. Would be just as fast and larger capacity.

 

[Talal Itani]

I am not sure about RAID, because I never tried RAID. A single drive seems
to me, to be cleaner and more straightforward approach. But, I think I will
now give it a thought, and educate myself about RAID.

 

[Talal Itani]

The PC I currently use is a few years old, and I do much waiting on
applications to load and start. With the PC I am putting together, I would
like to minimize the load and start time of applications.

 

[Icky Thwacket]

I am not sure about RAID, because I never tried RAID. A single drive
seems to me, to be cleaner and more straightforward approach. But, I
think I will now give it a thought, and educate myself about RAID.

Also if you want to build a quiet machine Raptors are not the way to go,
they are very noisy both in background spin whine and also head track change
clunks.

It is far more efficient to have a well maintained defragged 7200rpm drive
with 16MB cache than have a fragged Raptor - the performance will be
noticeably faster.

Icky

 

[Ken Maltby]

Also if you want to build a quiet machine Raptors are not the way to go,
they are very noisy both in background spin whine and also head track
change clunks.

It is far more efficient to have a well maintained defragged 7200rpm drive
with 16MB cache than have a fragged Raptor - the performance will be
noticeably faster.

Icky

I have very quiet machines that use WD 10k Raptors, you
must have some poor mounting situation. In fact I run two
of them in a water-cooled system where they would be very
noticeable, if they were noisy.

You must be a liberal if you think that last paragraph is a
valid, logical comparison. If you have equally maintained
and defraged drives, the Raptor will be noticeably faster.

It's not a question of whether the Raptor performs better
but whether it is enough better to justify its greater cost.
They have become cheap enough so that they are a good
choice for uses that can benefit from their performance.

The RAID comparisons are flawed as well. You can
create a RAID array using raptors, for one thing. Another
would be whether you gain anything buying several slower
drives to create a RAID array that can only match or very
slightly exceed the performance of an individual Raptor.
(Again it becomes a price performance issue.)

Luck;
Ken

 

[Trimble]

I look at this for the same reasons.
I decided NO ! not worth it.
If Raptors were say 20% more than standard SATA II then yes but at 3 or 4
times the
price with smallish speed improvement no.
The only faster disk way is RAID ...perhaps SCSI ..but that is another
expensive world
mouse
@@@

 

[kony]

The PC I currently use is a few years old, and I do much waiting on
applications to load and start. With the PC I am putting together, I would
like to minimize the load and start time of applications.

In that case, yes a Raptor will help and is a good choice.
Additionally, your system may benefit from more memory so it
is caching more files, reducing rereads from HDD.

 

[kony]

How about a matching pair of Samsung Spinpoint or Western Digital 7200 hard
drives in a RAID. Would be just as fast and larger capacity.

No it will have higher latency, suited for different uses
like high throughput.

 

[kony]

It is far more efficient to have a well maintained defragged 7200rpm drive
with 16MB cache than have a fragged Raptor - the performance will be
noticeably faster.

Why would you assume that someone paying attention to HDD
performance and thus choosing a Raptor, would be any less
likely to defrag?

As for which had higher performance in the proposed,
unlikely comparison, it still depends on the use. For OS,
on a modern multi-dozen GB HDD, since the OS is installed
first it tends not to get very fragmented. If the use is
very large files, a larger drive begins to make more sense
for the sheer capacity per $ from a typical 7K2 RPM drive.
For example working with video, a Raptor will fill up pretty
quickly unless only working with lossy highly compressed
files.

 

[DaveW]

I have two Raptor harddrives in my computer and they are MUCH faster than
standard harddrives. And they are built heavier duty to last longer.

 

[Cessna 310]

How about a matching pair of Samsung Spinpoint or Western Digital 7200 hard
drives in a RAID. Would be just as fast and larger capacity.

That has not been my experience. I've tried 2 X WD 3200 SE16 in RAID0
and not seen as good performance as with a 150gb Raptor.

 

[Vanguard]

I am thinking about a Raptor drive
...
Do you recommend the Raptor, over a standard 7000 RPM drive?

For performance, yes but primarily for first-time access to files (i.e.,
start and load, which is what you wanted), not for anything that is
still in cache (memory is far faster than hard drives, hint, hint).

For noise, no. If you don't care about more noise, why not go with a
15K RPM drive (you might need a SCSI card, though)?

 

[Vanguard]

I have two Raptor harddrives in my computer and they are MUCH faster
than standard harddrives. And they are built heavier duty to last
longer.

Don't they also run hotter?

 

[Talal Itani]

The Raptors have SATA150. Yet some of the newer 7000RPM drives have
SATA300. So, one drive spins faster, the other driver transfers the data
faster. Is Raptor SATA150 still faster than a non-Raptor SATA300?

 

[Talal Itani]

The Raptors have SATA150. Yet some of the newer 7000RPM drives have
SATA300. So, one drive spins faster, the other driver transfers the data
faster. Is Rapor still faster, even it transfers the data slower?

 

[Cessna 310]

The Raptors have SATA150. Yet some of the newer 7000RPM drives have
SATA300. So, one drive spins faster, the other driver transfers the data
faster. Is Raptor SATA150 still faster than a non-Raptor SATA300?

Though the potential is there for faster transfer, read and write speeds
for PC hard drives is lower than IDE100 rates. The only technical
benefit to SATA is for data write bursts which are limited to the size
of the hard drive cache.

The Raptor is faster than other very fast 7200rpm hard drives that I've
used.