Raptors

[Cyanide]

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

 

[Cyanide]

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"

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.

 

[Cyanide]

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

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?