Whats best?

Griff7520 · 8 Oct 2007 at 10:09

Some advice guys please

Whats best/fastest

1 x 74 gig Raptor or 2 x 250gig sata2 drives in raid o
or a mixture of the two.

I do a lot of gaming and burn the occasional DVD....Nothing that really stretches the pc
Spec is:-
Q6600
GIGABYTE P35 DQ6
2 GIG PC8500 REAPER
8800GTX
74 GIG RAPTOR MAIN DRIVE

Nothing is over clocked.

thx.

Griff7520 · 10 Oct 2007 at 10:36

thanks

Tute · 10 Oct 2007 at 10:52

The raptors are the fastest, however they have a poor £/GB ratio, which puts a lot of people off.

Best bet (if you can afford it) is to have a Raptor as your main drive - 74GB or 150GB, depending on your needs. Then add a second drive, a large 7,200RPM SATA drive for movies, music, etc.

Griff7520 · 10 Oct 2007 at 16:26

Tute said:
The raptors are the fastest, however they have a poor £/GB ratio, which puts a lot of people off.

Best bet (if you can afford it) is to have a Raptor as your main drive - 74GB or 150GB, depending on your needs. Then add a second drive, a large 7,200RPM SATA drive for movies, music, etc.

Thanks for that mate.....But i allready have a raptor as my main drive...and i have set up 2x250 gig drives in raid o for gaming...was wondering if i should use the raid as the system drive and the raptor for gaming or is there not going to be much difference?

thx in advance

milkinc13 · 10 Oct 2007 at 16:56

i personally would use the raptor for gaming due to quicker seek times, would mean the games loading quicker

stealthgeek · 10 Oct 2007 at 17:14

not necessarily - depends on how the games files are arranged on the disk - if you are loading huge, sequential files, the a raid 0 array would most likely beat it.

Also, as its a RAID 0 array you are twice as likely to lose data due to a failure, since your data is striped across both disks. Its up to you to decide which is worse, losing your entire PC, or losing your game installations.

Tute · 11 Oct 2007 at 00:08

I'd use the raptor for windows and games, and the other drives for storage.

Plasmoid · 11 Oct 2007 at 01:29

Yeah raptor for windows. Seek time is most important when loading loads of small, out of order files. Thats the definition of windows booting up.

As for games, its the big files that usually catch you.

As a plus, if your raid array goes south, all you have lost is your games not your windows installation, or hopefully your save games if they use your user folder to save them.

You didnt say what kind of 250gb's though... but if they are half decent they will beat the raptor at throughput soundly, just not seek time.

Griff7520 · 11 Oct 2007 at 09:34

they are 2x250 gig maxtor diamondmax 21 drives