Raptor worth it ?

FatRakoon · 4 Dec 2006 at 00:02

The SCSI is good. Its bound to be of course, but its nothing compared to some others out there, after all, its a home PC and me just dishing out the occasional few quid when the missus aint looking.

The Compact Flash is pure fun.

I have an Atari Falcon that uses a couple and for that, its fine as it accesses the disk about the same speed as a spectrum compared to a PC, but its ok.

I have actually got NT4 installed on a 1GB CF Drive in a Celeron upstairs that I did for kicks and I have actually found a use for it cos it lets me access NTFS Drives should I need to.

To be honest, its something like 4MB/s rather than 60 but it will be a laff wont it.

I will add that to the SCSI box, and do the comparison there... See if it goes above flat on the bottom eh?

Massive Attack · 4 Dec 2006 at 20:03

any results yet m8

sprognak · 4 Dec 2006 at 20:31

2x 7200.10 Seagate 320Gb's in RAID-0

Just for comparison really. Pair of them are cheaper than a Raptor X 150Gb and have over 4x the capacity.

Granted they're also twice as likely to fail with 2 making one unit in RAID-0, but they run cooler too

FatRakoon · 5 Dec 2006 at 02:09

Massive Attack said:
any results yet m8

Me?

No, I have been buggering about with RAID again today.

I have finally sorted out getting the DS3 to boot onto a RAID setup, after giving up on dozens of tries with various flavours of drivers etc, I gave up and intergrated the drivers into the CD and it worked great... Had a couple of issues caused by using a duff installation CD to base it on, and re-done it and its now running fine... I have also intergrated all my raid drivers for all my mobos and my PCI Cards and ran a quick install using all my PCs ( Just to one pair of drives though - im not that flush ) and they all install just fine and dont need the stupid floppy that never works anyway.

Ok, the SCSI / Compact Flash results... These will have to wait a couple of days as I dont have the time right now ( Just spent a whole day just installing to RAID like, but I dont have the time? )

Cyber-Mav · 5 Dec 2006 at 02:30

i can easily tell the speed difference from my 250 gig seagate 7200.10 vs my raptor 150g. the raptor is a lot quicker especially at the things im doing with it.

it all comes down to your need of capacity vs speed vs cost.

for me i could have got away with a 74gig raptor but 150 gig was cheapo enough for me.

nVIDIA_Master · 6 Dec 2006 at 11:46

Ok heres the tests done on my system, Both short and long tests were done. 2 74gb Raptors in Raid0 using gigaraid controller with drives on most up-to-date firmware.

Maxtor is a Sata2 300gb Drive standalone 16mb Cache

Raptor Quick test

Maxtor Quick test

Raptor Extended Test

Maxtor Extended Test

Raptors seem worth it to me?

Only a few seconds load time into BF2142, most other games are practcally instant load.

sprognak · 6 Dec 2006 at 12:01

Nice seek and burst times, but why aren't 2 Raptors beating the 2 Seagates on average read speed?

thefishdude · 6 Dec 2006 at 13:55

sprognak said:
Nice seek and burst times, but why aren't 2 Raptors beating the 2 Seagates on average read speed?

were abouts you looking ?? i can find the pic you mean

sprognak · 6 Dec 2006 at 14:10

sprognak said:
2x 7200.10 Seagate 320Gb's in RAID-0

Just for comparison really. Pair of them are cheaper than a Raptor X 150Gb and have over 4x the capacity.

Granted they're also twice as likely to fail with 2 making one unit in RAID-0, but they run cooler too

rpstewart · 6 Dec 2006 at 14:20

nVIDIA_Master said:
Ok heres the tests done on my system, Both short and long tests were done. 2 74gb Raptors in Raid0 using gigaraid controller with drives on most up-to-date firmware.

Is that controller on a PCI card? It strikes me that you're hitting a bandwidth limit looking at the shape of the Raptor graph.

nVIDIA_Master · 6 Dec 2006 at 16:03

rpstewart said:
Is that controller on a PCI card? It strikes me that you're hitting a bandwidth limit looking at the shape of the Raptor graph.

Mobo onboard

rpstewart · 6 Dec 2006 at 16:16

That's odd, what board are you using?

nVIDIA_Master · 6 Dec 2006 at 17:49

rpstewart said:
That's odd, what board are you using?

dq6

Massive Attack · 6 Dec 2006 at 21:03

noooooooooo dont say that, i have DQ6 and i was going to get another raptor and raid 0 them

Jaap74 · 6 Dec 2006 at 21:54

after reading all the above results I'm worried about mine :

HDTach short test
Raptor 74GB (16MB) - 136.8 MB/s
RAID0 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 - 158.4 MB/s
WD 500GB SATAII - 193.8 MB/s

shouldn't my Raptor be quicker than my WD backup drive ?? :confused:

rpstewart · 6 Dec 2006 at 22:02

I take it those are the burst speed readings from the bar chart in the bottom left?

Raptors are SATA1 and hence won't burst above 150Mb/s but anyway the burst rate is virtually irrelevant, all it demonstrates is how quickly the drive can push the contents of its cache down the cable. The average sustained transfer rate is a much more realistic indicator of a drive's speed.

nVIDIA_Master · 6 Dec 2006 at 22:05

Seem more like the Average read to me, my raptor bursts were 1000mb+

in which case, is probably about right if those other drives are new...

Massive Attack · 6 Dec 2006 at 22:08

Jaap74 said:
after reading all the above results I'm worried about mine :

HDTach short test
Raptor 74GB (16MB) - 136.8 MB/s
RAID0 Seagate 320GB 7200.10 - 158.4 MB/s
WD 500GB SATAII - 193.8 MB/s

shouldn't my Raptor be quicker than my WD backup drive ??

your backup drive is slow imo for a sata2 also i tjhink u may still have the jumper on your seagates, i wouldve expected much higher than that

Jaap74 · 6 Dec 2006 at 22:18

ok this may clarify :

HDTach short test

Raptor 74GB (16MB)

RAID0 Seagate 320GB 7200.10

WD 500GB SATAII

How's that look ?

(gotta shot down, will read replies tomorrow)

Cheers

rpstewart · 7 Dec 2006 at 07:53

Jaap74 said:
How's that look ?

(gotta shot down, will read replies tomorrow)

Cheers

The transfer rate graphs look just about spot on for each drive as do the average transfer rates and random access times. I would echo what Massive Attack has pointed out - the burst speed on the Seagates looks like they're running in SATA1 mode. Have a look and see if the jumpers are still set.