Hard drive choice.

[CREATIVE!11]

Hey all, im currently planning a new build and wanting to buy a good fast hard drive ive been looking at

Western Digital Raptor X 150GB WD1500AHFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM for 150 quid.

Just wondering is this a good choice? could i do better and get better value for money.

Also im planning to have the raptor as my main HD windows etc games on... and im just going to knock in another 100GB hd just to shove music etc on.

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[CREATIVE!11]

It's the eternal question isn't it. Do you go for the Raptor or a 7200rpm drive that gives you five times the space for the same sort of money?

What the Raptor does give you is very low average seek times so if you're trying to grab a lot of small files that are spread over the disk then the Raptor will win by a mile. Now pulling a large file off the disk is a different matter entirely, the Raptor's advantage is slim and there's a distinct possibility that the Hitachi 7K1000s could actually be quicker.

So what does that mean in real life? Windows is mainly a lot of small files so loading the OS should be a bit quicker on the Raptor, games on the other hand tend to be made up of large level and texture files these days so the 7200rpm drive isn't going to be that far behind if at all.

Hmm i might consider getting a bigger HD then... i mean raptor is pretty expensive all i want is much faster load times...so im not 100% what to do i read some reviews but was hoping for some more opinions.