HDD upgrade: Is there any point keeping my 150gb Raptor?

Soldato
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
14,595
Location
Wellington, NZ
I'm running out of storage space and looking at the WD Caviar Blacks, probably 1TB.. Is it worth keeping my 150gb Raptor as a boot drive or should I just stick everything on the 1TB and sell the Raptor? Raptors are getting on a bit now... have these 1TB drives caught up in terms of access times etc?
 
No, they haven't caught up. Most people wont agree but I would keep the os on the Raptor.
 
Thanks, the only downside to that is I will have to start installing Program Files onto the second HDD, there won't be any performance loss will there?

I guess I could just relocate my Steam folder onto the Caviar Black.. that's what's taking the main chunk..
 
You could always get an SSD (Miles better than a raptor!) and use the raptor for STEAM.

Hadn't considered that due to cost, but I think I'll quickly run out of space with the size of game installs these days. Have considered a NAS HDD too (obviously not for steam, just for storage).. hmm decisions.
 
Last edited:
I'm still using my 36GB Raptor I bought off the MM here for boot drive, it loads windows so fast I can't imagine anything but an SSD making a significant improvement. 150GB - yours will be a Velociraptor?
 
Dunno, I've had it years - This vista install is over 3 years old, so add probably 6 months onto that and thats how old it is!

Just says WDC WD1500ADFD-00NLR4 ATA device in Device Manager.
 
That's a normal Raptor not a Velociraptor, I use one myself as a boot drive and for some apps and stuff. All my games and Steam folder are on another drive, the only downside is it takes a few seconds for the drive to spin up when first loading a game as unlike the OS drive there's no need for it to spin up on boot. Access times are apparently what's important for an OS drive and the last time I looked at HDD spec's 7200RPM drives access times seem to have peaked when they had an areal density of 334gb platters(if I re-call correctly around 13ms, compared to around 8ms for a Raptor). I would only bother messing around with moving the OS to another drive if it was an SSD.
 
I've just gone with the 1.5tb seagate thats on offer, will keep the raptor for my OS and shift the steam folder to the seagate:)

SSD next year maybe:p
 
Back
Top Bottom