Any point in getting a velociraptor?

sammo62

sammo62

sammo62

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I'm thinking of buying a new system mainly for gaming (£1500 budget) and was looking into hard drives. I'm tempted by a small SSD for windows and then using a 300gb Velociraptor as a games/apps drive for everything else with an F3 for data.

SSDs still seem too much of a rip off for anything other than a boot drive, but I would like to improve load times on all my games. Only asking as not too many people seem to consider raptors in the spec threads ive nosed at.

Anyone got any advice for me?

Cheers.
 
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thing with SSD is they aint too big at the moment, to be honest i would probs fill a good 160GB+ easy with windows, games and apps, so not really much good.
i have a 160GB WD raptor and to be honest wish i didnt, cant get vista or win7 to recognise it to install on it, not sure what the newer ones are like.
 
I thought the latest generation of hard disks such as the Samsung F3 were faster than the Raptor due to the far greater data density.
 
An 80GB SSD will still hold a lot of apps and games.

There must be some you don't use often and they could go on a different drive (the 500GB F3 for example) but I wouldn't bother with a Velociraptor this late in the game.
 
I doubt you'd notice a big difference between say a Samsung F3 and a Velociraptor. Sequential speeds on the F3 are probably faster and access times aren't that much slower really.

SSDs on the other hand will give a major increase. Right now I'm using an 80gb X25-M for Windows and frequently used apps/games, yet I still have about 45gb free. I use a Samsung F3 1TB for everything else.

A perfectly fine compromise for me and performance is still excellent.
 
Geffen said:
I thought the latest generation of hard disks such as the Samsung F3 were faster than the Raptor due to the far greater data density.
Click to expand...

On actual sequential reads, yeah. The whole point of the velociraptors is the access time though (half I beleve?) the normal 7200 drives. It does reduce load times but I really can't agree that they're worth the extra cost over a normal drive anymore.

Much less difference than the original raptors used to make compared to 7200 drives. Better off stciking to F3s (still fast, lots of space) or getting an SSD (massive speed increase) if you want any value for your money at all tbh.

It just seems to be the more expensive but not that large or fast middleground. I have trouble calling it a middle ground either because it's nowhere near half the speed of an SSD, it doesn't double the speed of the F3 (F3 reads faster which makes up some of the access time advantage) and has less than half the space.

I just don't think knocking off 1/3rd to half the access time (8-10ms to 4-7ms) is really worth lower read speeds, paying more and losing 700gb space. You might question the whole SSD being value for money thing but hell nothing like going 8-10ms to 0.1ns access time, just does not compare at all - at least you're getting a highly noticable benefit there.
 
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