Best boot drive?

raptormonkey · 15 Jun 2009 at 21:54

Looking for a fast boot drive. Don't want to spend a lot of money on one, so SSD out of the question at the mo. So, what would you recommend? Is it worth getting a Raptor these days? I have noticed quite a few going 2nd around the place or is there another drive that would be best for using as a good / fast boot drive?

JonJ678 · 16 Jun 2009 at 03:55

SSDs are much, much better than raptors. If you cant fund a large capacity ssd get a 30gb one. If you can't fund a 30gb ssd, don't spend money on a raptor.

I assume that your chosen screen name means you're going to ignore this advice, but that's your call.

FaceplantSi · 16 Jun 2009 at 08:03

JonJ678 said:
SSDs are much, much better than raptors. If you cant fund a large capacity ssd get a 30gb one. If you can't fund a 30gb ssd, don't spend money on a raptor.

I assume that your chosen screen name means you're going to ignore this advice, but that's your call.

^^^ This.

Angst · 16 Jun 2009 at 09:56

JonJ678 said:
SSDs are much, much better than raptors. If you cant fund a large capacity ssd get a 30gb one. If you can't fund a 30gb ssd, don't spend money on a raptor.

I assume that your chosen screen name means you're going to ignore this advice, but that's your call.

ssd's maybe faster but unless your spending on an expensive 32gb intel ssd your most likely going to end up with one that stutters like ****, in my opinion youd be best of raiding two spinpoint f1's, these will beat the original raptors in speed and silence also will be faster than a cheap 30gb ssd. trust me i had a 30gb ssd.

miniyazz · 16 Jun 2009 at 13:51

Two F1s RAIDed will have faster sequential read/writes than a Raptor but will not be faster in real-world usage, because it is the lower access times of Raptors that make them fast.

Just avoid a JMicron controller in an SSD. The 64gb Samsung 1st gen will cost you about the same as a 30gb vertex or whatever, and won't stutter, and will give you far better performance than two F1s RAIDed, and better performance than a Raptor.

Angst · 16 Jun 2009 at 17:11

miniyazz said:
The 64gb Samsung 1st gen will cost you about the same as a 30gb vertex or whatever, and won't stutter, and will give you far better performance than two F1s RAIDed, and better performance than a Raptor.

samsung 64gb
price = 90.99
- Read: Up to 90MB/sec
- Write: Up to 70MB/sec
- NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC)

spinpointf1 320gb
price = 39.98
hd tune results collected from reviews
- read: max 114mb/s average 90mb/s
- write: -
times the spin points results by just under 2 and you have 600gb of space and double the speed of the ssd for about 20% less

FaceplantSi · 16 Jun 2009 at 18:42

The GSkill Falcon 128Gb SSD is one of the current favourites - it's based on the OCZ Vertex and so shares the Vertex's proven track record, the firmware upgrade-ability, has a Wiper tool for TRIM support, and can be had for around £250 - still a lot of money, but there is no denying the speed and responsiveness of these things - it's not just outright read/write speeds that matter but also the access times, and in these areas SSD's are leagues ahead of mechanical HDD's.

They are expensive - but imo they are also the best single upgrade you can do for a boost in overall system performance, but with all these things you get what you pay for - so if you are going SSD - for God's sake get a decent one!

raptormonkey · 16 Jun 2009 at 19:45

Too expensive. Think i wil either look for a 2nd hand raptor or get a 320g F1 Samsung!

master811 · 16 Jun 2009 at 20:58

phill0i said:
samsung 64gb
price = 90.99
- Read: Up to 90MB/sec
- Write: Up to 70MB/sec
- NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC)

spinpointf1 320gb
price = 39.98
hd tune results collected from reviews
- read: max 114mb/s average 90mb/s
- write: -
times the spin points results by just under 2 and you have 600gb of space and double the speed of the ssd for about 20% less

Except that doesn't take into account response times which are effectively zero (compared to roughly 14ms of most HDDs), so unless you are often transferring large files on and off your drive, you will so no performance benefit using those samsungs over the SSDs.

raptormonkey · 16 Jun 2009 at 21:08

So, other than SSD, which is too expensive for me, what should i be looking at?

Angst · 16 Jun 2009 at 21:48

master811 said:
Except that doesn't take into account response times which are effectively zero (compared to roughly 14ms of most HDDs), so unless you are often transferring large files on and off your drive, you will so no performance benefit using those samsungs over the SSDs.

except for the fact that raiding 2 drives halves the access time because the
file is being retrievd from 2 drives simultaneously

sambo_joseph · 16 Jun 2009 at 22:04

phill0i said:
except for the fact that raiding 2 drives halves the access time because the
file is being retrievd from 2 drives simultaneously

I thought it was just the sequential reads/writes that were boosted in a RAID set up and not the access times. Even if it halved the access time of an f1 it would still be 6-7ms....which is very far off the 0.2ms of the ssd

raptormonkey · 16 Jun 2009 at 22:14

So, other than SSD, which is too expensive for me, what should i be looking at?

drak3 · 16 Jun 2009 at 23:20

phill0i said:
ssd's maybe faster but unless your spending on an expensive 32gb intel ssd your most likely going to end up with one that stutters like ****, in my opinion youd be best of raiding two spinpoint f1's, these will beat the original raptors in speed and silence also will be faster than a cheap 30gb ssd. trust me i had a 30gb ssd.

My vertex 2x30GB raid stripe does not stutter ...

miniyazz · 17 Jun 2009 at 00:20

phill0i said:
except for the fact that raiding 2 drives halves the access time because the
file is being retrievd from 2 drives simultaneously

Nope. If anything, RAID 0 increases the access times because the data is under an extra layer of complexity. The only thing that will improve the access times on an HDD AFAIK is higher queue depths - the disks performance will actually increase as the queue depth increases because the requests for data reads/writes can be coordinated so they are done in the way involving least head movement.
The only thing RAID 0 does is increase sequential read/write throughput. The Samsung SSDs will be faster in real-world OS use, just not for transferring large files.

lay-z-boy · 17 Jun 2009 at 00:47

phill0i said:
except for the fact that raiding 2 drives halves the access time because the
file is being retrievd from 2 drives simultaneously

Wrong. Access time goes up when placed in a raid array and increases the more drives you add.

For a boot drive it's best to get an ssd. It's the low access time you want not huge sequential read and write which looks good on paper but has little real world benefit.

Zarf · 17 Jun 2009 at 00:59

I've had a RAID0 raptor setup and trust me, SSD's blow it away.

Get a 30GB Vertex or 64GB cheap Samsung. Both around the same price as a 150GB velociraptor, and much faster, on top of being silent. When the PB22-J's are in stock they will be an even better choice giving you both great sequential speed and size.

Mechanical drives are good at one thing only - sequential file operations. As soon as any multitasking happens, or you are doing things like extracting or installing from a file on the same drive you'll be lucky to see a tenth of the rated speed.
With an SSD it doesn't matter anywhere near as much how you are using the drive, on the SSD setup I just built for a friend I can go from the start of the windows load screen after POST to using firefox in ten seconds, there's no waiting around for all the various taskbar apps and services to load becasue the ssd handles multitasking well enough to load them all at once.

Same sort of thing with opening a folder with hundreds of files, on an ssd there's no delay whilst the OS looks up the details and loads the thumbnails.
All the little things add up and you find general usage of your computer a lot more pleasant, which is why an SSD will be my next upgrade despite using a two year old 8800GTX.

Any time you hear your hard drive crunching is a situation that would be improved by SSD's.

Rroff · 17 Jun 2009 at 01:02

I would go with raptors personally...

SSD might be quite a bit faster initially - but unless you keep maintaining the disc your gonna run into performance degredation and end up with worse performance in the long run.

Zarf · 17 Jun 2009 at 01:09

Rroff said:
I would go with raptors personally...

SSD might be quite a bit faster initially - but unless you keep maintaining the disc your gonna run into performance degredation and end up with worse performance in the long run.

Even degraded, SSD's will be much faster.
By christmas time SSD's will be much better value for money and your raptors will be looking a very poor choice indeed. Thats why I sold my Raptors and am tiding by on a cheap F1 for a few months.

master811 · 17 Jun 2009 at 01:14

Rroff said:
I would go with raptors personally...

SSD might be quite a bit faster initially - but unless you keep maintaining the disc your gonna run into performance degredation and end up with worse performance in the long run.

Windows 7 will be able to fix that issue though (or at least prolong the performance it so it doesn't become a such a problem).