Fast reliable disk?

Sandmaster500

Sandmaster500

Sandmaster500

Associate
Joined
20 Jan 2005
Posts
1,116
Location
Leeds/Oxford
Hi, looking to get a new main hard drive. My idea at the moment is to run a 74gb raptor and a 200gb spinny (already got). But am contemplating saving a little and getting a 150gb raptor. Is the new raptor much faster and will it have the same reliability as the older ones. Or i could get a WD Caviar 250GB SATA II 16mb cache. Whats the best overall? Main thing for me in getting a new drive is reliability as i've had two drives fail recently which has really really annoyed me.

Any help would be very useful as i'm a bit stuck as to what to do.
 
Personally i'd spend the £200 on a 74gig raptor, raid it with your other one for speed and then buy a 200gig spinpoint and raid those two aswell. So you have very fast, fast and quite fast storage.
 
Oops, sorry i only have the 200gb spinny at the moment not it and a 74gb raptor.

When you say "spend the £200 on a 74gig raptor" do you mean a 150gb raptor or 2 74gb ones?

Thanks
 
Skilldibop said:
Personally i'd spend the £200 on a 74gig raptor, raid it with your other one for speed and then buy a 200gig spinpoint and raid those two aswell. So you have very fast, fast and quite fast storage.
Click to expand...

WHAT?

His main requirement is relibility. Doing RAID0 would double the chance of losing all your data with very minimal increase in speed.

I think your best bet would be get the 74gb raptor. I find mine just about the right size for a system drive.
 
lol. At £110 are they a good price point? Only other option is looking at either a second hand 74 or 150gb.

How much performance difference in both loading times and general use is there between:
150gb raptor
74gb raptor
WD 250gb SATA II 16mb cache

Thanks :)

ps - no fighting you two you have the same post count so you both have to be right :D
 
Thinking about it i am not sure if i "need" the speed of a raptor so am thinking of going for a 7,200 250gb drive as i believe these are the best performance/size/value.

What is the fastest/best manufacturer?

Thanks
 
Reliability of most discs is approximately the same. Seagates have a 5 yr warranty, WD drives are probably the best all rounder, Hitachi are probably the fastest and Samsungs are known for being quiet. Maxtors I'd avoid from the experience of many people around here.

I'd say go with the Seagate just for the sake of the 5 yr warranty. Just make sure it's a 7200.9 (latest model).
 
I have 2 x 250Gb WD SATA II (RAID0) 16Mb cache for OSs and apps.

Plus a 300Gb Seagate SATA II for data.

No problems so far.
 
Cheers :)

I very much agree with the maxtor thing, had two go myself which out of the 6 HDDs i've had in my life and only one of which was more than 2 years old!

Rambaud - how much difference speed difference do you find between the drives?
 
I've got a WD250GB 16MB cache drive. It's pretty quiet and nippy. But according to hdparm in Linux, my Maxtor DM10 (I know I know..don't jinx it now :P ) is very slightly faster (for sustained transfers) - but I don't notice any difference in use.
 
for the price of a 74gig raptor you could probably raid0 2x40gig hitachi's and raid1 them to an 80gig drive. That way you get very fast performance and proper redundancy.

or 2x80 and 1x160 etc. depends how much space you need. The Hitachi's are the fastest 7200rpm drives out at the moment.

Storage Review

Thats a good site for information.
 
Kamakazie! said:
for the price of a 74gig raptor you could probably raid0 2x40gig hitachi's and raid1 them to an 80gig drive. That way you get very fast performance and proper redundancy.
Click to expand...

RAID 0+1 requires 4 drives. You can't do it as you've mentioned since most RAID arrays do mirroring / striping on bit basis and hence you need equal number of drives either 'side' of the mirror.
 
In my opinion, forget about raid0, its just hype, unless your going to use your machine as a server or decode/encode movies etc, it really doesnt help noticeably for all the bother and the extra risk of losing all your data involved.

The 150gig Raptors also come with 5 years warranty
 
People seem to be of very mixed opinions about RAID 0. I think i might have to give it a go one day just to decide for myself.

Am pretty much set on a 74gb raptor after looking at some benchies and seeing it beat my samsung (which isn't a slouch) by 20-50% :eek:
Also as its been out for a long time i think it should be very reliable and isn't a huge amount slower than the 150gb which is quite a bit more expensive (ie i want one but close to £200 is just too much for me to spend on a hard drive)

Between the 7,200 drives it was too hard to choose!

Thanks for your help guys
 
I can heartily recommend Maxtor MaxLine III 300GB drives. Been more than happy with mine since I've had it. It's currently the only drive in my main PC and it does perform very well.

I've never benchmarked it but PAR2 checking seems to chew through a 50MB per second. Random accessing is fairly good (NCQ helps there). As for reliability, well they're supposed to be good for a million hours MTBF, which gives me some peace of mind.

My next upgrade will be another MaxLine III or Pro (the 500GB version).
 
Got a 74gb raptor in the end. Is such an amazingly fast drive! Load windows in 17 "elephants"! and thats with an extended bios! Games and files load so fast :)
Am glad i spent the extra as i now feel more as though my data is safe aswel.

Thanks for help guys
 
Well it isn't *that* safe - I have an RMA on an 18-month old 74G Raptor with a dead controller. Tried to do an advance RMA (they send you a new one, you send the broke one back after it arrives). Just got a message from WD saying there will be a further 2 week delay - they've got no Raptors left to send out! Seems like there's been a run on replacement Raptors...
A 5-year warranty doesn not mean they are reliable, just that they cost more to cover all the broke ones they have to replace.
 
imo id go for 4 37gig raptors, in raid 1+0 that would be definatly kick the speed and redundancy.

Unless 2 fail in 1 side of the mirror; soo unlikely your data is safe, And to be honest raid0 isnt just hype. I used it on 2 x 300gb Maxtor 16mb cache for a while for OS, was REALLY quick; quickly than the current raptor 37g im using ;).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom