What to replace raptors??

BENdage

BENdage

BENdage

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15 Jan 2004
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My Chair, Peterborough
I am thinking about some new drives for the system in sig. I'd like to replace the 2 36gb raptors with some SATA2 drives with NCQ to keep the speed up. A bit of extra space would be nice, but not too much of an issue as I have a file server over my network. I've got a bit out of touch with what is available recently and was hoping you could make some suggestions for a max of £150. Storage really isnt much of an issue, I just want performance. The system is used for gaming, video conversion, web browsing, uni work, a bit of everything really.
 
Anything other than a Raptor (or SCSI == money) will lose you considerable performance.

Saying that, i've gone to a Samsung Spinpoint SP2504C 250Gb (cost £80 inc P&P), and the only thing noticeably slower is bootup. Its much quieter and has a good turn of speed - general use is about the same.

Raptor 150Gb is great - but over budget considerably (and as it happens, not SATAII either)... You could probably get two 74 giggers for about £150 at auction.

Oh, NCQ tends to slow things on a desktop, not speed them up. It only really helps in a server type environment where the drives gets hit with lots of commands (requests) it seems.

M
 
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Thanks, I put it in the cases thread when I did it this time last year. Its my next upgrade I'm trying to sort now.

I thought I'd read that lots of drives were faster than the 36gb raptors now? Ones with SATAII/300 should outperform surely? If they're still as good as I can get, I'll put the extra money towards some graphics cards...

edit: Found the review, its in custom pc mag. The Deskstar T7K250 seems to perform better on paper
 
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BENdage said:
I thought I'd read that lots of drives were faster than the 36gb raptors now? Ones with SATAII/300 should outperform surely? If they're still as good as I can get, I'll put the extra money towards some graphics cards...
Click to expand...


Only SATA drives faster than Raptor 36s are its bigger brothers, the 74 and 150Gb models.

SATAII dont outperform as even in RAID0, few drives are capable of going beyond 150Mb/s, and even then only for burst speeds (which are taken care of by the cache on everything but files larger than the cache size).

My RAID0 Raptor 74s managed ~125Mb/s (within the capability of ATA133 interface still) - similar i believe for 150Gb raptors.

SATAII will only really become useful (over and above SATAI/IDE) as an interface when we have drives that are capable of faster read/write transfers, or drives that have a HUGE cache.

M
 
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