New Raptor Review

Not sure I see a point to the drive for myself. I am after a Raptor drive, But for me it's a purchase for my OS. And there's no way my OS + Other software is going to take up 300gb.

So for me, It's going to be the 74gb Raptor still + a 1tb drive I fancy at the time of purchase (Next few weeks)

Obviously, The drive speed + space is going to come in handy for someone. Just not me :)
 
wannabedamned said:
So for me, It's going to be the 74gb Raptor still + a 1tb drive I fancy at the time of purchase (Next few weeks)
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Thats what i have and it's pretty decent. I was advised by some of the users above that RAID0 is only really appropriate if your reading a huge file, i.e., when people are video editing etc. As for games, many people comment that a decent RAID array will only give you a couple of seconds at the very best. I know it's tempting for the benchmarks etc .. but :rolleyes:

I have the 74gb raptor as my vista boot drive and it feels super snappy. The F1 1tb on the other hand is being used for apps / movies and it is amazingly fast.

TBH, i would love the above drive but i tend to agree in that the speed increase over say a F1 or AAKKS would not be worth it. As one of the admins said, the drive will come down in a few months.
 
Skarironfist said:
If people read the reviews they will see the answer to most of their own questions.

The reason for the 16MB vs 32MB was that WD felt with their testing/profiling that they wasn't a justification for the increase in memory. So unless we have some harddrive designers in the house, maybe worth going with it. Though if I was a cynic you could say they are leaving up nice easy upgrade in the pipeline for the future.

They obviously felt the drive was sufficiently good enough for the current competition.
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Thankfully some one making sense in this post of nonsense. As pointed out read the freaking review please. I am still astounded people are still using and considering RAID 0, I thought that fad must have died ages ago.
 
helmutcheese said:
For clocka's Benefit :

IMO yes, but as someone said, if you Partitoned of a smaller section on the Centre of a fast modern 7.2k HDD and only used that space for everything it would be faster as the Head has to move less to read ALL Data. (waste of a bigger HDD IMO).

If this was really fast everyone would buy a 750+GB HDD and use a 100GB of it (example) to be faster than a Raptor X :p.

I can only go by my own uses, apart from Dual Booting I do not use Partitions.
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Incorrect, the centre of the platter is closer to the spindle and rotates less frequently than the out edges of the disk. This is in fact the slowest place to put your data when it should be physically on the edge of the platter.
 
It also passes the head faster than outside, think of a Merry Go Round.

The outside edge travels more distance to get back round.

At the end of the day I dont Partition so who cares.

Hmm, do you know much ?, you seem to think Raid0 is not any use today ?

Raid0 is not a fad and its more in use in OEM's today then ever.

Even if I have got confused and got it round the wrong way, I knew what Im mean and think its a waste of time and i know Raid0 does perform, the fact you can make the biggest bottleneck in a modern PC a bit faster is good.
 
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everyone keeps saying the samsung f1 drives ***, but iv yet to see any samsung drive that out does any raptor drive in access time speeds.

thats what a raptor is all about, small 36, 74gb or so for primary boot and apps then the rest of your stuff off a slave drive for storage capacity.

have yet to see someone use a raptor drive just to slap loads of films on it and fill it up with mp3s.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
everyone keeps saying the samsung f1 drives ***, but iv yet to see any samsung drive that out does any raptor drive in access time speeds.

thats what a raptor is all about, small 36, 74gb or so for primary boot and apps then the rest of your stuff off a slave drive for storage capacity.

have yet to see someone use a raptor drive just to slap loads of films on it and fill it up with mp3s.
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No drive can match the seek time no but plenty of drives beat the 150gb raptor in all other areas (which are more important for the majority of us e.g extracted a 4.4gb .iso from rars etc.

Now finally the 300gb raptor beats all the other drives in virtually every single way which it had done at the launch of the previous raptors but those were out several years ago now. Since the 750gb wd launched about 9months or so ago the raptors just havent been worth it, especially with these new samsung drives but now the tables have turned. The raptor is undeniably the best desktop drive out there but its a pretty penny at £211. The 150gb raptor launched at around £160 so the price is a bit steep for most. The 320gb samsung f1 is 1 of the fastest drives around and only £50, 4x price for 10-15% faster for most things isnt really worth it in most people's oppinions (INCLUDING MINE). So if you're rich get 1 of these or 2 in raid0 but those who arent rich will probably get a samsung 320,500,750,1tb as they arent that much slower and dirt cheap 1tb - £100. 2 of those in raid0 would beat a raptor in virtually everything and would have £10 left over and 1.7tb extra storage or buy 2 * 320gb samsung f1 for £100 in raid0 and have the same speed but with £110 left over.
 
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Personally I wouldnt get a raptor for £211.

I'd pay a bit more and go for the OCZ 32GB SDD. 100 MB read across the entire disk with 0.1ms access at £350 and also get a Samsung 320gb F1 (£50). Double the price but its an unbeatable combo.
 
helmutcheese said:
Raid0 is not a fad and its more in use in OEM's today then ever.

Even if I have got confused and got it round the wrong way, I knew what Im mean and think its a waste of time and i know Raid0 does perform, the fact you can make the biggest bottleneck in a modern PC a bit faster is good.
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RAID 0 on the desktop is a fad, twice the risk and of no benefit to almost evey user. RAID 0 is never used in servers, RAID 10 is sometimes.
 
I'm sick and tired of HDD's, they are the most primitive turds in PC's. They still even have moving mechanical parts. Other things progress nicely, but HDD's have not come very far in performance in the last decade or more.

I've got all this fancy high-end hardware in my machine yet the hard drives slow things down SO much. Imagine how much everything would change if HDD's were faster. Windows could boot up in under 10 seconds, games would load almost instantly... as current processors and RAM are all capable of this kind of speed, yet the HDD is a massive bottleneck. Yet so few people moan about it as they have just come to accept it.

I cant wait until SSD's come down in prices, they will surely be even faster by then too. Until then i might get two of these new Raptors for RAID0, atleast i'd get nearer to reasonable speed then.
 
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helmutcheese said:
3) I dont see anywhere claiming its got Perpendicular Recording, if it does use this Tech they would surely boast about it in specs.
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On the other hand, if it's not using PR, how on earth are they squeezing that amount of data onto the platters? Could be wrong but if I had to put money on yay or nay, I'd say it's using PR.
Laptops had 300GB HDD before this tech AFAIK (they do not need only have 1 platter)
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Not sure on that one
You DO realise this new Raptor has 2 Platters not 1 (thats to follow).
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Of course, I did specifically mention 150GB platters, two of which make a 300GB drive.
 
AbsenceJam said:
RAID 0 on the desktop is a fad, twice the risk and of no benefit to almost evey user. RAID 0 is never used in servers, RAID 10 is sometimes.
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Rubbish, you get near double the transfer rates and considering most people use the RAID 0 array for their windows install that makes a big difference. You rule out the chance of failure by spending more money on an enterprise class drive like the Raptors

I've had a couple of the original 74gig drives in RAID 0 now for 3 years and it's still going strong. It's taken that long for the ordinary desktop drives to catch up.
 
As a raptor owner, my next brand new build will definately include one of these for the system disk. £211 isnt that bad, and its not as expensive as I expected.
 
You can get two brand new 76gb 15k SCSI drives for the same price. All you need after that is a card and cable which is another 60 quid or so second hand.

That setup will blow any of your raptors away, RAIDed or not.
 
What's the point though, it has 1/4 of the storage space, will add another 10 seconds to the boot time while the SCSI controller card runs down the ports and costs more.

SCSI setups in desktop PC's is pointless and not always faster being that most SCSI cards are firmware optimised for reliability and multitasking which is not the best configuration for desktop PC's.
 
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