Raptor gaming performance

Sawell

Sawell

Sawell

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Right, due to the hype that's surronded these hard drives since the day they came out I've been increasingly tempted to buy one, and use some raid0 standard satas for storage only.

The thing I don't understand is where the performance shows, is it only in the loading of applications? Or does it improve your FPS?
 
They are considered more of a waste of money i beleive now. The people who have them tend to have them because they can afford to spend on extra things. Unless youve got 4gb of ram. A nice quad a nice g80 gtx. Id spend money on them first.

Normal hard drives are catching up fast and having 2 in raid 0 is probably on par with a raptor now anway. I dont think youll see much of an improvement over 2 seagates in raid 0 over a raptor. Games just dont require that much bandwith i dont think.

Applications will load faster and in games any stalling of loading parts of the map should load faster i gues. Not sure about fps.
 
RAID 0 for dedicated storage is an exceedingly bad idea, especially if it's a single user machine.

A faster disk setup, be it higher RPM drives or a striped RAID, makes loading times faster and that's about it. If you have enough memory a game shouldn't be using the disk too much whilst playing, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. being an exception to this.
 
raptors are old tech now, modern drives are MUCH cheaper per gb of storage space, and the performance difference between a raptor and a modern drive isnt that noticible, in fact it would be cheaper to put 2 7200.10 into raid 0 which would give you a good amount of space and speed and still be cheaper then a raptor which has less space.

As for storage, as its been said before, do NOT use raid 0 for storing important files, if one drive dies, the data on the other is unusable.
 
You actually got Raptors 16MB's ?

They are still faster than 99% of 7200rpm HDD's overall and 100% of 7200rpm HDD's for SEEK.

And Raid or non Raid you should always have a BACKUP so no big deal and Raid0 esp on modern HDD's is as safe as it gets.

I have ran Raid0 for years now and crash PC every day while overclocking etc and never have lost any Data ever and if I did its backed up as everyone should anyhow.

The OP's question answered correctly would be YES, the Raptor 16MB's will make PC faster and load APP's/Game levels faster.

But this late in the day I would buy another type of drive or wait and see what next Raptors have to offer, the new 7200rpm HDD's are only near/as FAST now as of Perpendicular recording and the Raptors are sure to get this next along with a SATA300 interface and hopefully a 32MB Cache.
 
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I dont even go to that site after their BS in past.

Raid0 helps most games load faster but not as much as old days as games are better coded now, but the OP's question remains about speed not storage and so in the answer the same from me.

And you wont notice the difference unless you actually have ran them, no amount of reading web will show that, they simply feel snappy.

Still would either buy a fast 7200rpm as its late for current Raptors now or wait on next gen Raptors.
 
The only occasion you would get more FPS from a Raptor would be cases when the drive is being accessed during gameplay. Or in other words, either when you run out of memory and start paging (in which case your money would be better spent on RAM) or if something needs to be loaded or written on the fly from/to the disk. The latter is so rare during normal gameplay which so little gain that it would a waste of money.

Bottom line: Getting a Raptor to increase framerate would only be worthwhile once you've already exhausted all the better options (i.e. phase change cooling for full overclocking, QX6850, 8800ultra-SLI, ridiculously high end RAM etc). It's worthwhile for load times and things like that, but the performance difference during actual gameplay will be negligible.
 
the whole raptor thing gets discussed a lot on the HDD section of these forums, and if i remember right people showed graphs of their hdd speed, and although raptor had faster seek, it had slower sustained transfer speeds, and unless you need to do LOTS of seeking, then a raptor just isnt worth it.

Dont forget that raptors are also a lot louder then other drives too, and im guessing they put out more heat too due to that faster rotation (when i tried a raptor i didnt have anything to check its temp, but ive read about them getting hot and my current hdd doesnt get to hot at all).
 
People say they dont like raid 0 because of the risk of it failling but ive always thought a hard drive that has a faster spinning rate and produces more heat is more likely to fail. Therefore surely raid 0 is better then a raptor as far as failure rate is conserned?
 
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1) Peeps can only now show a 7200rpm HDD doing same as or just above a Raptor 16MB at AVERAGE Sustained Tranfers Speeds cause its only recently came true, cant be touch for SEEK as of spindle speed.

2) A HDD is the slowest bottlenecked part of any modern PC for many years so the faster you make it the better.

3) Raptors's do run faster and hotter than some (not that hot and cooler than some 7200rpm's ) but they are build to Enterprise Spec's hence price so not a issue.

4) Any HDD be it 7200rpm or 10000rpm in Single or Raid use can fail so should be backed up regularly and todays HDD's are far better than years ago so I would not loose any sleep over it esp if backed up as you all should do.

5) Current 7200rpm HDD's only just beat Raptors now as of Perpendicular Recording so the drives reads more bits of data with less movement and hold more data too, they cant make a 7200rpm HDD much faster any other way than whats already been done and Raptors will be next to get this tech wish new models we hope.

WD already have the worlds fastest 750GB HDD and other day the worlds largest capacity for next few years models.
 
I think I fell for the hype as I have a raptor.

I think they may be a tad quicker than other drives in certain cumstances, but they are loud.
I use other Western Digitall drives for storage, and they are nigh on silent.

My sounds like err....bacon sizzling. It annoyed me so much I bought a Scythe box for it to shut it up.
That near on another £30 quid for what is already one of the most expensive drives per MB you can buy.
 
If you turn OFF the Acoustic Management its louder still while Seeking :).

You should look into mounting it with no metal to metal contact.
 
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im with helmutcheese, ive raid0 for years and used hitachi,samsung,etc...sata1/sata2.....you can not beat the performance of a pair of raptors in raid0,esp if you use xp(pro).windows pages to disk ALL the time and not when you just run out of ram(even if you set it to No Paging File, it still does it)

1. if you dont need much storage(like me,xp pro/games) why not get 1 ?...they are still the fastest HD you can buy(sata)
hope this helps m8;)
 
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