Raptors

Cyanide · 23 Apr 2006 at 11:18

I'm running out of space on my 120Gb Barracuda and I was thinking of getting a 36Gb Raptor to stick windows and stuff with long loading times on... but are they worth it?

Will I see a difference in bootup time? How much louder are they than a normal SATA drive and are they faster than a RAID0 setup?

Thanks

wilders · 23 Apr 2006 at 14:41

I was just thinking the same thing....watching this with interest...

Sparky__H · 23 Apr 2006 at 14:46

Cyanide said:
I'm running out of space on my 120Gb Barracuda and I was thinking of getting a 36Gb Raptor to stick windows and stuff with long loading times on... but are they worth it?

It depends to be honest as for nearly the same money you can get a 300-320BG drive.
36GB is a tiny about of storage now and wont even hold a single HD-DVD or blue ray disc and you would struggle to get even 7 DVD-5’s on it.

I bought one because they do improve system performance for me but I also bought a few large capacity disks for crap storage.

Cyanide said:
Will I see a difference in bootup time?

Yes defiantly but how many times a day do you turn it on or off in a day?

Cyanide said:
How much louder are they than a normal SATA drive

This depends person to person quite a lot but make no mistake its quite loud at spin up and seek noises do tend to be a rattle. My hearing as absolutely shocking but I can still pick up very high frequency noises like a raptor spinning or my poxy phone charger buzzing away, so I have to stick all my in a drives silencers.

Someone will properly correct me on this but the 36GB versions are missing some of the improvements WD have made to their drives to address the noise issue like fluid bearings and the like.

Cyanide said:
are they faster than a RAID0 setup?

The point is 2 x a drive is NOT! 2 x the speed but it IS! 2 x the risk of data loss. As files are split between the drive (well it depends on the size) if one craps out for whatever reason you lose everything. Unless you swapping huge files about on a regular basis don’t bother as in my experience it gains don’t equal the risk.

/me has flashbacks of horrid raptor death data loss happy fun time…

I would recommend you get decent large capacity SATA2 drive as TBPH your get a lot better bang for your buck at the end of the day.

Cyanide said:
Thanks

Your welcome

Overlag · 23 Apr 2006 at 15:11

im a new raptor user..... and while they are good, i dont think the performance increase is worth while

granted my drive died after 7 days so i never really got to fully "feel" the drive....

Cyanide · 23 Apr 2006 at 16:14

Sparky__H said:
Yes defiantly but how many times a day do you turn it on or off in a day?

Quite a few... I get moaned at if I leave it on when I'm in the room 'cuz of "the cost to keep it running" :rolleyes:

Sparky__H said:
The point is 2 x a drive is NOT! 2 x the speed but it IS! 2 x the risk of data loss. As files are split between the drive (well it depends on the size) if one craps out for whatever reason you lose everything. Unless you swapping huge files about on a regular basis don’t bother as in my experience it gains don’t equal the risk.

But at the same time only having 1 drive presents the same problem. Does RAID0 decrease the MTBF or something? Because I've always heard people saying that it's a huge risk to vital data etc, yet I can't see the difference between RAID0 and one big disk apart from speed increase.

ChrisLX200 · 23 Apr 2006 at 16:21

Biggest advantage for a Raptor is the reduction in seek time - it's about twice as fast as your standard drive. Sustained data transfer is not much different tho.

Your basic WinXP install might need to open 1000 files to boot up, a more 'mature' install with plenty of apps could be double that. A standard drive might then be spending 2000x15ms = 30seconds just finding the files on the disk. That time does not include reading the data off the disk - just finding it. A raptor will half that to about 15 seconds because the seek time is also half.

The 'Average Seek' time is dependant upon how much of the physical disk surface the heads have to traverse (all of it if there's only one partition on the drive). So, if you divide the drive into two equal partitions, with WinXP on one of them, then all seeks within that one partition will be constrained within half the physical drive. That is the speed benefit of partitioning a drive - reduced average seek.

You can help the situation even more if you use something like Perfect Disk to defrag it, and use 'Smart Placement' to put all the files opened at boot time at one end of the disk. Combine that with a raptor and you have the fastest single-drive solution.

A Raptor works great as the system disk, where there are loads of small files to open and close it provides a visible performance boost. Might also help with games where there are lots of scenery/texture files to continually open, but a waste of time for things like video editing.

gr1mey · 23 Apr 2006 at 16:54

I bought my raptor as a boot drive, run all my applications from it and I can say that they are fast - however in my case with no HDD vibration dampening they were loud due to being 10000rpm, seeking on the drive made a horrible grinding noise.

I purchased one of the silentmaxx enclosures and I have to say its eliminated almost all of that noise, and it keeps the drive cooler than it was

ChrisLX200 · 23 Apr 2006 at 16:56

Cyanide said:
But at the same time only having 1 drive presents the same problem. Does RAID0 decrease the MTBF or something? Because I've always heard people saying that it's a huge risk to vital data etc, yet I can't see the difference between RAID0 and one big disk apart from speed increase.

Not exactly, the MTBF for each drive remains the same - you don't half it because there are 2 drives instead of one! However the MTBF is an estimate (a very crude one at that) based on the number of components - electrical and mechanical - that comprise the device. It sets a lower bound on the chances of a drive failing within a specific timeframe. For example, it might suggest there's a 95% possibility your drive will still be OK in 3 years time - but there's always that 5% chance it might break early. With 2 drives you've got 2 chances one might break early.

The real problem with simple RAID0 is, on home PC systems, that it's very difficult to recover from a failure. The added complexity of additional controller/driver also makes it more likely that something will go wrong in the first place, and when it does the software tools to help get your data back aren't there.

If you make regular backups then it's OK, you can always recover your data. Many times I've had a RAID0 go down for apparent trivial errors and it's been unrecoverable other than restoring a backup.

kinetic747 · 23 Apr 2006 at 17:31

I put a Raptor in my new system and, although it performs great, it's noisy as hell. It sounds like someone in clogs walking on gravel so I'm looking at a Silentmaxx enclosure also. :cool:

gr1mey · 23 Apr 2006 at 17:35

the enclosure is brilliant, does exactly what you want - and it is possibly the best-looking piece of aluminium Ive ever owned. I just need to modify a spare front bezel on my case with a window so that u can see the front of the enclosure. Lovely blue colour and sexy chrome silentmaxx logo :cool:

kinetic747 · 23 Apr 2006 at 19:15

Cool, I'm sold. :cool:

westie17 · 23 Apr 2006 at 19:41

gr1mey said:
I bought my raptor as a boot drive, run all my applications from it and I can say that they are fast - however in my case with no HDD vibration dampening they were loud due to being 10000rpm, seeking on the drive made a horrible grinding noise.

I purchased one of the silentmaxx enclosures and I have to say its eliminated almost all of that noise, and it keeps the drive cooler than it was

I put a Raptor in my new system and, although it performs great, it's noisy as hell. It sounds like someone in clogs walking on gravel so I'm looking at a Silentmaxx enclosure also.

These 2 basically sum it up, it is pretty loud but i use headphones all the time so i dont really notice the noise that much and in the rare few times i do use my speakers i have the volume up real loud so i dont notice it anyway.

Cyanide · 23 Apr 2006 at 20:59

Well I just used PerfectDisk on my Barracuda and it's loading windows in half the time it did before :eek:

The Raptor does seem a good choice, but I'm not sure I can justify such a large price tag for such little storage space and mid-level speed boost.

How would a pair of 40-80Gb Barracuda's in RAID0 (with the 120Gb as a backup) compare in speed? They'd be about the same price and I'd have much more storage. Or would I be better with just one huge 250Gb+ drive?

Cyber-Mav · 23 Apr 2006 at 21:01

i would like to replace the 13.6gig drive in my server with the faster raptor 36gig drive but from what i hear the raptors aren't really that reliable seeing as they keep failing.

i thought raptors would be amazingly reliable drives.

Richdog · 23 Apr 2006 at 21:06

I have a 36GB Raptor as my main windows drive and it isn't earth-shattering. In fact the 36GB Raptor is far slower than the 74GB (which I also have as a games disk) and really isn't worth the money. There are many SATA drives that equal or sometimes exceed the 36GB Raptor in performance, andhave the advantage of a 5x larger capacity. I'm planning on buying a 150GB Raptor for games and moving the 74GB to my windows install and then the 36GB will be sold asap. Get the 74GB Raptor or don't bother, because the 36GB just isn't worth it.

SiriusB · 23 Apr 2006 at 22:25

I would deffo go for the 74GB Raptor if you want summat fast. However, I wouldnt recommend RAID0. As others have pointed out its expensive [2 disks or more] and you have n number of disks x chances of failure. Two pretty big Cons for the advantage of a bit of extra speed.

If you have to turn your PC off simply because you leave the room for a short while, have you considered Hibernating your PC? The PC would be switched off, but would take a fraction of the time of a full boot to get back to whatever it was you were doing.

SiriusB

gap · 24 Apr 2006 at 18:16

Found this website http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html , if you want speed buy a Raptor

gr1mey · 24 Apr 2006 at 22:02

the trend with the raptors is that speed is realtive to size, and the fastest being the largest - strange but true.