Hitachi 250GB SATA2 For 150GB Raptor???

Pulsedriver · 18 Jan 2006 at 00:26

Hi,

I have a Hitachi 250GB SATA-2 Drive as my main hard disk, and was wondering, if the new WD Raptor 150GB would be a noticeable improvement in speed?

Im not bothered about loosing the 100GB storage space if the Raptor is considerably (and noticeably) faster.

I do a lot of Audio work, the 2nd hard drive is a 160GB Hitachi SATA-2, and the storage of my music work, however the main drive above is where Windows and my music programs, games etc are installed, so the 16MB cache of the Raptor could help a lot?

Any thoughts folks?

Sean

smids · 18 Jan 2006 at 00:49

Run a HDTach and compare to this:

Yes, you will notice the difference. I haven't had a Hitachi SATA-II drive yet, but I had 2 SATA1 drives of theirs - and although fast, these are simply faster at doing everything, noticeably.

NB: Ignore burst, only look at average read and random access

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Pulsedriver · 18 Jan 2006 at 01:05

I just ran a HD Tach (quick test) and here is the result;

24MB slower than your Raptor in the average read!!!

smids · 18 Jan 2006 at 01:18

Believe me, you will notice the difference. I have just split up my 74GB Raptor RAID0 and gone with one single 150GB drive - mainly because it isn't that much slower.

AnastieByte · 18 Jan 2006 at 07:58

I had a "failed" Maxtor Diamondmax 10 with 16mb cache. Replaced it with one of these 250GB Raptors and love it. There is a noticable speed increase in general and Battlefield 2 loads over a minute quicker when combined with 2Gb ram

My speeds are almost identical to Smids (if not slightly faster)

noxidjkram@hotm · 18 Jan 2006 at 09:05

I have a 250Gb Samsung Spinpoint SATAII - they average at a touch over 62 Mb/s read.

I don't notice much difference between this and my Raptor RAID0 (36s).

You will get an improvement, but only on load times of windows by a few seconds and games by a few more seconds.

Its whether your budget can afford it for the sake of a few seconds really...

M

Ken · 18 Jan 2006 at 13:09

I agree with all of the above. Although I only have UT2004 installed right now, it and other applications load faster. Unzipping large zip files and moving around large files is faster. It makes the whole Windows environment feel nippy. I also have the Hitachi T7K250. I thought that was fast but the Raptor is definitely noticeably faster. Win XP boots up fast as said and the progress bar doesn't manage to reach the end but I've switched back to Win2KPro as I prefer it and boot up time hasn't really increased but I suspect this is OS related.

5tephen · 18 Jan 2006 at 15:03

That's definitely good for a single drive, but I have 2 RAID0 arrays of T7K250 drives and they are nippy, 98Mb/s average read, although admittedly the seek time only averages 12.3~ms. I do make use of the increased storage though, so it's a better option for me

Burst speed is 213Mb/s for the 2x160Gb's, though not as important as smids said.
I also have 2x250Gb's but they're only on the sil3114 controller rather than the nVidia one, and the burst speed is only 128mb/s

Other specs unaffected though.

Is it not true that with a reasonably fragmentation-free drive, that a larger drive like a T7K250 performs better with large files because they are more densely packed per platter? I remember reading a review comparing them, and the raptor won most tests but the large SATA drive won a couple of tests related to something like this :confused:

smids · 18 Jan 2006 at 16:06

5tephen said:
<snip>

Is it not true that with a reasonably fragmentation-free drive, that a larger drive like a T7K250 performs better with large files because they are more densely packed per platter? I remember reading a review comparing them, and the raptor won most tests but the large SATA drive won a couple of tests related to something like this

Yes it is true, and for the reasons you state

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