Raptors?
- Thread starter lolage
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Man of Honour
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That is a good average read speed but I've got my doubts about the burst speed, it is considerably faster than the interface should be able to support unless I'm misreading. 
Soldato
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Something to do with the write back cache?
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LOL, Now that fast 
I have just purchased all the necessaries to do my full upgrade to a quad core system and have decided to start from scrath with a new hard drive also. I would love to know if it is worth buying 2 x 74GB Raptors to install Vista Ultimate x64 on and also to run my most intensive games and most often accessed ones on? I currently run 2 x 36.7 but they are long in the tooth and I have decided to install my new system on a brand new setups across the board. Do i go for SATA II drives or Raptors?
Rest of system is:
Q6600 Go
EVGA 680i SLI
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 768MB
BFG Ageia PhysX 128MB Card
4GB Corsair (2 x 2GB)
Thermaltake 1200w PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Will eventually be going SLI so hence SLI mainboard.
Rest of system is:
Q6600 Go
EVGA 680i SLI
BFG 8800 GTX OC2 768MB
BFG Ageia PhysX 128MB Card
4GB Corsair (2 x 2GB)
Thermaltake 1200w PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
Will eventually be going SLI so hence SLI mainboard.
Caporegime
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thing is, seek is mostly important when you have a server holding hundreds of small files accessed by multiple users which would cause completely random access. home use, loading a game, booting windows, loading an app. 99% of it is longer reads meaning one real seek then sustained transfer, can anyone feel the difference between 5 and 9 ms? no .
for ANY raptor setup you can buy 2 OR more 7200 drives, with more capacity for CHEAPER, and have much faster transfer rates, i mean, MUCH. i got a 7200.10 drives, must be over a year ago now not much more than a year, they do 135mb/s in raid, about 70-75mb sustained. but again, if you get a £100 raptor, you can buy 2x£45 250gb drives, raid them, have a much faster setup and have 2-3 times the capacity.
raptors from the day of release have never been better than other drives due to the prohibitive cost. there has not been a single day since release that for the same money other drives can't be faster. the only situation where they are better is the multiple small file access situation, games, general home usage, video watching and so on.
theres also very little reason they are so expensive except, people keep buying them, because everyone likes shiney new things that theoretically sound better. if people just raided 7200's for cheaper, they would have dropped the cost pretty dramatically by now.
if raptors dropped to a price point where 2 7200's aren't cheaper then a single raptor, then they might be mildly worth it. anandtech's review pretty much shows very little difference between say the 1tb hitachi's, and the raptors in single or raid setup. in reality the hitachi's aren't that fast, they are only a little faster than previous generations. years ago the very first raptors were noticably faster than single drives, but slower in raid , now they are barely, if at all faster in single drive, let alone raid.
for ANY raptor setup you can buy 2 OR more 7200 drives, with more capacity for CHEAPER, and have much faster transfer rates, i mean, MUCH. i got a 7200.10 drives, must be over a year ago now not much more than a year, they do 135mb/s in raid, about 70-75mb sustained. but again, if you get a £100 raptor, you can buy 2x£45 250gb drives, raid them, have a much faster setup and have 2-3 times the capacity.
raptors from the day of release have never been better than other drives due to the prohibitive cost. there has not been a single day since release that for the same money other drives can't be faster. the only situation where they are better is the multiple small file access situation, games, general home usage, video watching and so on.
theres also very little reason they are so expensive except, people keep buying them, because everyone likes shiney new things that theoretically sound better. if people just raided 7200's for cheaper, they would have dropped the cost pretty dramatically by now.
if raptors dropped to a price point where 2 7200's aren't cheaper then a single raptor, then they might be mildly worth it. anandtech's review pretty much shows very little difference between say the 1tb hitachi's, and the raptors in single or raid setup. in reality the hitachi's aren't that fast, they are only a little faster than previous generations. years ago the very first raptors were noticably faster than single drives, but slower in raid , now they are barely, if at all faster in single drive, let alone raid.
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Rule of thumb about 60% more sustained READ's, you wont get a HDD doing 60MB/Sec getting you 120MB/Sec adding another in Raid0, probably 100+MB/Sec )
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dont modern 500gb+ 7200 rpm beat raptors easily now? Because higher capacity means the data stored on the platers is more dense, and so 1 spin on a 7200 rpm drive will have had more data go under the read head then a raptor. so although a raptor is spinning 2800 rpm faster, a 7200 rpm driver has over twice the ammount of data moving under the read head, which should more then make up for the lack of speed. (this is all unless i have misunderstood how the data on harddrivers is stored on large capacity drives).
The way i see raptors, is a small step between 7200 rpm drivers and scsi drives, problem is, the raptors dont provide a noticible performance gain over modern 7200 drives.
The way i see raptors, is a small step between 7200 rpm drivers and scsi drives, problem is, the raptors dont provide a noticible performance gain over modern 7200 drives.
The only one that I know which has a higher average sustained transfer rate than the current Raptors is the single platter Seagate 250Gb 7200.10. I assume the 1Tb 7200.11s will also be quicker since they use the same platter.
If you want to compare the older, slower 8Mb cached Raptors then all the 7200.10s and the WD AAKS/AAJS drives can shift data faster.
which car u'd prefer to own?
car A 0 - 60mph in 5 secs, top speed of 100mph
Car B 0 - 60mph in 10 secs, top speed of 150mph
my raptor is perfect drive for OS as windows use million of files during boot up, superfetch or whatever its called. unrar 100 files from usenet MUCH faster than any drives i owned, even the new 750GB sata hard drive.
car A 0 - 60mph in 5 secs, top speed of 100mph
Car B 0 - 60mph in 10 secs, top speed of 150mph
my raptor is perfect drive for OS as windows use million of files during boot up, superfetch or whatever its called. unrar 100 files from usenet MUCH faster than any drives i owned, even the new 750GB sata hard drive.
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The Raptor 16MB's have a very low seek and when you Raid0 2 drives your seek goes up so 7200rpms have a slower seek anyhow so even slower in Raid0.
I would like to know if there is any discernable difference between 1 raptor 150gb n 2 in raid0. I would like to think I could justify over £100 on a 2nd drive but am still unsure at this point - can anyone help?
**EDIT** plus as a games rig I can't see myself needing more than 150gb or would i???
**EDIT** plus as a games rig I can't see myself needing more than 150gb or would i???
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