2 or 3 raptors?
- Thread starter arfur
- Start date
They are from a popular auction site - 2nd hand - they are readily available - but tend to be quite expensive from this country so I normally source them from the States! My 15k4 36Gb was brand new and only cost about £40 so I was very happy with that! Makes an excellent windows drive 
(I've also just finished installing a 3rd drive onto my games partition and it's blistering:
Average Read: 146Mb/s
Random Access 5.8ms
Burst Speed 385Mb/s
Those are with HDTach and it's unreliability with SCSI is legendary, but it gives you a rough idea! - really the acid test for me is the level load times in BF2 - and I am always first! )
(I've also just finished installing a 3rd drive onto my games partition and it's blistering:
Average Read: 146Mb/s
Random Access 5.8ms
Burst Speed 385Mb/s
Those are with HDTach and it's unreliability with SCSI is legendary, but it gives you a rough idea! - really the acid test for me is the level load times in BF2 - and I am always first!
)
Associate
Do you have problems with the sheer size of the cables you have to have? I've had SCSI before and the cables where the most annoying thing about it. The drives where excellent, but again, very expensive unless you get them second hand.
Awesome performance tho...
Awesome performance tho...
cavemanoc said:They are from a popular auction site - 2nd hand - they are readily available - but tend to be quite expensive from this country so I normally source them from the States! My 15k4 36Gb was brand new and only cost about £40 so I was very happy with that! Makes an excellent windows drive
(I've also just finished installing a 3rd drive onto my games partition and it's blistering:
Average Read: 146Mb/s
Random Access 5.8ms
Burst Speed 385Mb/s
Those are with HDTach and it's unreliability with SCSI is legendary, but it gives you a rough idea! - really the acid test for me is the level load times in BF2 - and I am always first!
Wow.. thats some nice score..
but do you Raid them?
Actually - it was the cable that was causing the problem (that's 3 so far that I've had issues with 
) - I've gone for an external solution by modding an old 'beige box' I had lying around to take all my drives, and then running the standard, internal, cables to it (solved all my spaghetti problems ), somewhere along the line it got snagged and damaged which drove me up the wall trying to troubleshoot, but now that it's fixed it's running a treat again!
As for raiding - yep - they're all in Raid 0's - one of the requirements of the Dell card is that in order for the Drives to be active they have to me in a Raid Array - so even my single windows drive is set up as a Raid 0 of 1 drive!
I'm actually quite happy with the 3x18Gb setup at the moment as it is noticeably quicker than the 2x18Gb I had before - might have to get another!
Biggest issue is the fact that the Dell card is Pci-e - awesome performance, lousy layout on my DFI sli-DR
) - I've gone for an external solution by modding an old 'beige box' I had lying around to take all my drives, and then running the standard, internal, cables to it (solved all my spaghetti problems ), somewhere along the line it got snagged and damaged which drove me up the wall trying to troubleshoot, but now that it's fixed it's running a treat again!As for raiding - yep - they're all in Raid 0's - one of the requirements of the Dell card is that in order for the Drives to be active they have to me in a Raid Array - so even my single windows drive is set up as a Raid 0 of 1 drive!
I'm actually quite happy with the 3x18Gb setup at the moment as it is noticeably quicker than the 2x18Gb I had before - might have to get another!
Biggest issue is the fact that the Dell card is Pci-e - awesome performance, lousy layout on my DFI sli-DR
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I had an Adaptec 29160LP controller card (64bit model) and a 7 cable which gave me upto 7 devices.. it was huge and annoying, never had the room for the cables, the drives wherent a problem mind...
ok its done, I've read loads of forums and came to the conclusion that the 7200.10s offer better storage per £ than the raptors (no surprise I know) but unless your moving loads of huge files theres no benefit of the raptors over the barra's, so i've ordered 3 of them for raid 0 (all my important stuff will be backed up to the other 2 raid array) so if the raid dies I will only loose the OS's... I'll post results when its done 
Soldato
I thought the 7200.10 in RAID0 would actually have a better sustained transfer rate than Raptors in RAID0, so they'd be better at moving loads of huge files.arfur said:
arfur said:ok its done, I've read loads of forums and came to the conclusion that the 7200.10s offer better storage per £ than the raptors (no surprise I know) but unless your moving loads of huge files theres no benefit of the raptors over the barra's, so i've ordered 3 of them for raid 0 (all my important stuff will be backed up to the other 2 raid array) so if the raid dies I will only loose the OS's... I'll post results when its done
Looking forward to seeing the numbers!
Probably the right decision - the only other question is 'are you going to get a controller card for the drives?' or are you relying on the onboard controllers? Worth having a read around as the difference can be quite a lot!
I do have a spare controller card in my server, I think I'll put the disks in and use the existing OS install to test them as 1,2 and 3 disks and post the results... not sure though if the DS4 does 3 disk RAID 0... DS3 doesnt as the Intel controller doesnt support raid and the GB one only has 2 connectors.
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Looking forward to the results
ok,
the setup is -
E6400 (def)
DS4
BFG 8800GTS
2Gb GEIL 6400 (2x1gb)
Creative XFI Fatality
Coolermaster Stacker
Tagen 580w (which might be at its limit )
OS - XP Pro
and 3 segate barracuda's 7200.10's 16Mb cache in RAID 0
using HDtach I got the following results
1 disk - burst 214mb/s, avg 66mb/s
2 disks - burst 268mb/s avg 87mb/s
3 disks - burst 358Mb/s avg 101mb/s
thats sweet....
I'm currently now reinstalling XP and Vista onto the new array to test it out properly, but its looking good. Can anyone compare these disks to raptors? I'd be interested in how they perform considering they are only sub £70 for 320Gb.
the setup is -
E6400 (def)
DS4
BFG 8800GTS
2Gb GEIL 6400 (2x1gb)
Creative XFI Fatality
Coolermaster Stacker
Tagen 580w (which might be at its limit
)OS - XP Pro
and 3 segate barracuda's 7200.10's 16Mb cache in RAID 0
using HDtach I got the following results
1 disk - burst 214mb/s, avg 66mb/s
2 disks - burst 268mb/s avg 87mb/s
3 disks - burst 358Mb/s avg 101mb/s
thats sweet....
I'm currently now reinstalling XP and Vista onto the new array to test it out properly, but its looking good. Can anyone compare these disks to raptors? I'd be interested in how they perform considering they are only sub £70 for 320Gb.
Soldato
Burst means nothing mate and those average reads aren't looking too great.arfur said:
You should expect around 130MB reads for 2x 7200.10 in RAID0.
strange... I wander if this could be the boards? I am using the Intel RAID control and my mate has a DS3 and he's using the Gigabyte RAID controller and both 2 disk results are pretty much the same.... oh and yes I have removed the jumper from the end of the disks....