SINGLE 74GB RAPTOR OR 2 7200.10 RAIDED

Thebug

Thebug

Thebug

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As it says in the title really - i want to speed up my "C" drive. i currently have a single 7200.10 on a asus p5b-deluxe.

also why is vista always doing something with the hard drive. if i boot into xp i rarely hear my hdd but vista is constantly searching.
 
In that case, Raptor is much more likely to help you with general speeding up of C: drive than a RAID of 2x Seagates. Raptors have a significant seek time advantage which can't always be compensated by a higher sustained transfer.

But on the other hand, if you're annoyed by the HDD making a noise too often, you'll want to keep away from the Raptor. The Raptor is almost silent in idle, but it sounds like a muted machine gun in seek, so if Vista uses the HDD more frequently, you'll hear the loud seek more frequently as well.
 
If you can do something with 1 disk then choose that route.

I cry every time I remember an array of mine failling. Especially raid 0!

Now if you plan to raid two raptors for the pretty much best performance, then you dont have any choice but raid.

Your call however :)

cheers

ps: you can reduce the raptor seek noise with 10 quid rubber mounts etc. Mine stoped doing the gun sound since I installed 2x Scythe rubber mounts. There is some still, but for long time raptor users its a WOW.
 
Personally I'd go with RAID0 and backup if you want to increase performance on your C: drive. I say this because I tried it myself with (IIRC) 2x WD 250GB drives and saw a significant increase in speed, and the Seagate drives are even faster than those. Secondly, having two drives gives you more flexibility in the future as you can split the array and use them as storage, run them in RAID1 for backups and so on.
 
I did a lot of searching throu the forum about buying a Raptor and Raiding as I wanted a quicker system like you. I changed my 7200.10 for a single 74gb Raptor and I am well pleased with it. In everyday use there is a speed increase and I understand raid doesn't do much in everyday tasks anyway (better for big file transfers).

Windows XP is now reinstalled in just over 9 minutes.

I think the seeking is because Vista is always defragging the hd from what I have read on here.
 
Yes, defrag is automatic when cpu is idle. Raid 0 for everyday use is maybe useless, but when you heavy download and extract etc you pretty much use IO two times as much so you benefit.
 
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Thanks guys but i went for the raptor in the end and must say im glad i did. i was a bit worried about the noise but its no worse than my old maxtor.
 
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