WD Raptor.....worth the layout?

[Thorsson]

Mmm. That says you're running your display in 16-bit colour. I hope it's wrong.

[TooNice]

Just noticed that the old laptop I am borrowing right now is also set to 16bit. I do have the option of 32bit, but I didn't even notice the 'loss' till now so I'll probably just leave it. It's still 65k colours, probably not a big issue for office work/browsing.

[emul8]

Mmm. That says you're running your display in 16-bit colour. I hope it's wrong.

Hmm so do I,
I think it must be wrong I will check tonight

[Stevo3000]

I've just bought a 150Gb Raotor as my system disk and a 750Gb WD AKKS as my data disk. So far I'm very impressed with the Raptor, It's quick and as far as I'm concerned it's quiet! I would definatly recommend it to anyone!

Paying for a 500Gb drive just to partition some of it off for quick access around the edge seems to be exactly the same as spending over the odds for 150Gb of Raptor! Except for the fact that using a partition always reduces the performance of a drive and the Raptor is still quicker!

[malfunction]

The raptors are very expensive and I probably wouldn't justify the purchase for myself on the grounds of cost alone. If money isn't an issue though I think you'd still notice the difference - I've used them at work in the past and while current 500GB+ drives may be able to match the raptor in terms of sequential transfer rates the raptor has much quicker (lower) seek times so is going to be better for more random acess usage. How much of that you'd notice in games is debatable but as an OS drive I could always tell the difference. If noise, cost and heat are not an issue I'd be tempted to try out a proper server spec drive - like a 15K RPM SAS:

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Of course not only is the drive more expensive again (than the raptor)... you'd also need a SAS controller... (you can plug normal SATA drives into a SAS controller but you can't plug SAS drives into a normal SATA controller)

[da.Guvna]

Hahaha, right, I gotta be honest with you guys....I was almost hoping for a straight-forward "YES", above anything else

This is all useful info though. The partitioning concept is a good one, and it makes perfect sense, but I'm very lazy and I've always, always, always hated the feeling of being restricted that you get with partitions.

I used to partition my system drive back in the days of '98 so as to keep file fragmentation down, and found that it just restricted my options later on. Though, that may well have been due to the fact that HDDs were way smaller, and I hadn't thought partition sizes through properly.

I definately think I'm leaning toward getting 2 regular drives now though.
My only issue is this:

TooNice reckons that in order to achieve the same speeds as a raptor, you need to get at least a 500gb drive to ensure the storageuter-edge ratio is high enough. 640Gb is better.

The thing is.....I simply don't have any need for that much storage. I've been running off a 200gb RAID-0 setup quite happily the past year, and that's got all my games/music/etc stored on it.
Could I not achieve a near-raptor speed with 2x 320gb drives?
Partition the outer edge on disk-0 for windows, and then the outer-edge on disk-1 for games?

[peterb]

Mny people have tried the partitioning theory with reported good results. However there is no gurantee that that speed advantage will remain over the lifetime of the disk (and there is actually no way to gurantee that the partition will be on the edge of the disk, although that seems to be the perceived location.

Why? Well, the actually physical layout of the disk is hidden by the onboard drive controller. It maps the physical layout of the disk to the LBA structure that the computer works with. So although you are adressing LBA 34 (say) that sector could be anywhere on the disk surface.

Secondly, all drives have duff sectors - and sectors fail over the lifetime of the disk. To overcome this there are spare sectors which are mapped in to replace the defective ones - again transparantly to the user as it is all handled by the drive controller, so you could get some sectors swapped out and replaced by sectors at the centre of the dosk. One would hope that the mapping algorithm is such that the spare sectors are distributed across all the platter surfaces, so the nearest physical one is mapped in to minimise seek times, but that is not open to inspection by the end user.

I'm not knocking the theory as suchh - as I say, others have tried it and claim that it works, but I do wonder if the improvement in speed will be sustained over the lifetime of the system.

[pollaxe]

Totally overpriced.. I have two and like them very much though (including one of the stupid windowed ones in my Lanbox!)

[Lourdes]

The Raptors are out of date and the price is stupid, current (and not so current) SATA2 drives give better transfer rates and you would never really notice the Raptors access times in a desktop situation.

WD and Samsung both have single platter 320GB models in their latest ranges, they should be rather fast indeed. But consider the cost of a Raptor, you could buy 2 500GB disks for the price anyway.

[crazy]

i've got the raptor x for os/games/apps and 500gb for everything else
it is quick & a bit loud, i dont really think its worth the money considering you could get around 750gb for near the same price ( as a raptor x). only went for it cause i found it for a good price

[Minimos]

To be honest, just picked up the latest copy of Custom PC in the UK, in their recommended parts sections they recommend the Samsung T166 500GB, according to them it loads Far Cry and Photoshop faster than a 10K RPM Raptor, although I have no proof myself.

[Lourdes]

To be honest, just picked up the latest copy of Custom PC in the UK, in their recommended parts sections they recommend the Samsung T166 500GB, according to them it loads Far Cry and Photoshop faster than a 10K RPM Raptor, although I have no proof myself.

It trasnfers data at a faster rate so it would do. Were a game loading lots of small files from all over a drive the Raptor may be slightly better but otherwise it's not comparable to a good SATA2 drive.
And the HD501LJ (T166 500GB) isn't as fast as the new F1's.

[s3ds]

voted no
i like SAS

[malfunction]

To underline what everyone's been saying check this out:

Faceoff at One Terabyte: Seagate's Barracuda ES.2 and WD's Caviar GreenPower | StorageReview.com

The raptor easily has the lowest seek times and the highest *minimum* sequential transfer rate. The larger 7,200 RPM drive can happily meet or exceed it's maximum transfer rate and I suspect "short stroking" them would bring the minimum sequential transfer rate up to (or beyond) the raptor as well. In fact even the WD GP's max sequential transfer rate isn't that far below the raptor. Of course if / when WD release a newer high capacity raptor it may grab the performance lead again...

Oh and whatever you do if you want to google "short stroking" use "short stroking hard drive" !

[Cistron]

Cistron, how do you force a partition to be located on the outer edge of the disk? I thought that was reserved for the swapfile?

Oh sorry, I overlooked your post. Partitions are usually always made from outside to inside - for many Linux distributions you can even chose were to make which partition ('from the end'/'from the beginning'). I'm not sure how it is arranged on a multi-platter HDD though. Either it fills up all platter simultaneous from the rim (which would be smarter speed-wise) or sequentially one platter after another.

[peterb]

Strictly you can define which blocks are used for a given partition - it is an assumption (although not an unreasonable one) that block numbering starts at the outside edge and works inwards, but as staed earlier, blocks could be numbered across the platters in the order the mfr chooses for optimum performance.