Should I get a Raptor Drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Talal Itani
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T

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.
 
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.
Click to expand...
From everything I've read, yes. :-)
Click to expand...

Joel
 
Talal said:
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.
Click to expand...


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 said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Talal Itani said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
Talal Itani said:
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
Icky Thwacket said:
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
Click to expand...

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
 
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
@@@
 
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.
Click to expand...


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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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


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.
 
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.
 
GT said:
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.
Click to expand...

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

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)?
 
DaveW said:
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.
Click to expand...


Don't they also run hotter?
 
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?
 
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?
 
Talal said:
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?
Click to expand...

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.
 
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