Hard drives...out of touch?

[daverobev]

I want to speed up load times on World of Warcraft...game runs okay on my Athlon 64-2800+ with a gig of ram, but loading stuff is a bit painful...its running on a 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda (5, IIRC) at the moment, IDE.

Mobo has no SATA, just IDE, so I was thinking of a PCI SATA card (cheap one? Or is there a real benefit to getting a decent one? Linky?) and a WD 74Gb 10k Raptor...but I'm thinking to myself, its been a while since I've looked at hardware, surely there must be a newer, better version by now...the Raptors are a year or so old?

Or is putting this over the PCI bus a waste of time in the first place, and I should either get a good IDE drive with large cache (usually partial to Seagate Barras)/not bother until I get a new mobo?

I'm perfectly happy with the system, would just like the loading screens (and all the texture loading etc) to go a bit quicker.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[mike_w]

I don't think SATA would be much faster than PATA - if I remember correctly, the limiting factor on speed isn't the transfer speeds, but the actual mechanics of the drive itself. You could always go for RAID, but that might be over the top just to shave a few seconds for loading times.

[daverobev]

Yeah, but you can't get 10k RPM raptors on standard IDE...its this that I'm after, they are sposed to be reeeeally fast!

[The Hand]

They are noisy aswell sadly. My mate has one.. hes moans about the limited size too.. but it is very fast.

[daverobev]

Meh...my compter sits on my desk right now anyway..how bad can it be?...best not to ask, maybe!

[Rys]

They are noisy aswell sadly. My mate has one.. hes moans about the limited size too.. but it is very fast.

In my experience - I've used over a dozen Raptors, 36GB and 74GB - only the 36GB version is noisy. The 74GB version is much nicer on the ear, and would be great if you have the wallet for one and can stomach SATA.

[Hottentot]

You need a SATA 2 interface and a Hitachi T7K250 to get a decent speed jump.
Some of the reviews rate this drive as almost twice the performance of the Raptor.
I can't see that an adapter card would work though as it would be on the PCI bus which would limit the data throughput from the drive.

[SilentDeath]

I think youd see more improvement from more ram really.

Dont know how much ram WOW uses, but if its anything like eq2 (very similar games anyway) then 2gb would help a lot.


OR consider one of the new gigabyte ram drives.. that will be faster although it does also require sata but ebuyer sell cards for £5? or was it £15...

[Steve]

In my experience - I've used over a dozen Raptors, 36GB and 74GB - only the 36GB version is noisy. The 74GB version is much nicer on the ear, and would be great if you have the wallet for one and can stomach SATA.

I'm with this guy. I have three of these right now and they're not all that bad. I've heard far worse.

[rajagra]

I want to speed up load times on World of Warcraft

Load times? What load times?
I have 36GB + 74GB raptors in my system, but I think I ran out of space & had to install WoW on the 15KRPM SCSI drive.
I wouldn't recommend using a PCI card. You can buy SATA to PATA convertors, though! Might be the best way to use raptors.
Silly question: have you done a defrag recently?

[SilentDeath]

Converters only work for PATA drives on a SATA connection, not the other way round afaik...

[PeteSmith]

What about a Maxtor 300GB 16mb cache. There supposed to be pretty nippy.

[The Hand]

Im getting a WD 300GB Caviar HD delivered tomorrow.. I've had trouble with Maxtor's HD's in the past. Although my present 60GB maxtor is doing ok with only a couple those awful clicks recently after nearly 3 years. :\

[DeludedGuy]

Im getting a Maxtor 10, 200gb SATA drive delivered soon, cant wait to see it

[SilentDeath]

Im getting a Maxtor 10, 200gb SATA drive delivered soon, cant wait to see it

My 3xDMP10's dont seem that amazing..

[SHISH]

Put a couple or three PATA in raid0 off a halfway decent card. Cheap and cheerfull and watch them fly. Unless of course you have deep pockets.
Limiting factors are the pci speed (ie, how fast you can dump the data across the 33Mhz pci, better if you can get them off that) and if you use raid, especially, the block size for the data type you`re running.