Are raptors worth it?

Carl

Carl

Carl

Soldato
Joined
1 Nov 2003
Posts
3,517
Hi there, i was going to buy the raptor below with my new spec.

Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache

And was hoping it would be worthwhile because id like my games and O/S to load and run quicker.

Would i get a good performance boost over a normal harddrive?

I already have 2 x Hitachi Deskstar 160GB SATA-II 8 drives for storage.

Thanks, Carl
 
Nowadays they're probably not worth it imo.

Don't forget they've been out quite a few years now and haven't really changed a great deal during that time. Nowadays with the sort of data density you get on regular drives now you'll probably get the same if not more Mb/sec transfer rates from them.
 
The newer Raptor 16MB's are faster for sustained speed and seek, unless you have ran one you wont know, sure new drives are getting near then but not for seeks.

I personally dont need 500-1000GB on PC at any one time thats why I have back up drives, I was so impressed with 1 RaptorX in every day use of PC thats I got another and ran them in Raid0 and that was on a old PCI bus not modern PCI-E bus.

Its one of few parts of hardware that I was actually 100% happy/impressed with ever, the cost did not bother me and they cost £237 each at launch anout 1+years ago.
 
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I agree with the others. Don't get me wrong my 2x 74Gb Raptors have been great, and I've had no issues with them, apart from running out of space, lol. But if I had to choose again. I would have gone for a bigger HDD, maybe the 250+ GB.

But if you have set your heart on one of them, at least go for the 150Gb disks :)
 
depends if you need lots of storage, if you dont need more than 74gb then get a raptor, if you need more then get a 500/750gb.
 
Not really as the 7200RPM drives have caught up in speed and plummeted in price. I sold my 74G Raptop about 6 months ago for a Samsung 320GB :cool:
 
No 7200rpm HDD has caught up in speed period be it Average Sustained Tranfers (only part you need worry about in HD-TACH) or seek times.

If you dont need lot of space and dont care about cost, get one, you wont be disappointed, if you grudge cost per GB or small size then dont buy one, simple as that.
 
i wouldnt say they are worth it and i own one. Probly gonna sell mine at some point in the future as the speed gains really arent worht the silly price anymore
 
I can only reiterate what some others have said; I love my Raptor 150 and it's noticeably quicker than any other HD I've booted from, but these days, getting two 250GB WDs and striping them will be as quick, cheaper, and much more storage space. 74GB isn't much these days considering game installations are now several GB sometimes.
 
I have a 150 GIG raptor as my windows boot disk.

And 500 GIG seagates formy data

Never have my important data on my windows disk ever.
 
If you don't need the space, get the Raptor. It is the same drive I use for os with a 35gig partition.

I used to use a 250gb 7200.10 (now storage drive) for os, then changed to the Raptor. Overall I did see an improvement and am pleased I 'upgraded'.

Installed XP in 9 mins using a E6300 @2.87ghz. Now running 2 in raid0. Now installs XP in 7 mins!!!
 
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