Raptor or spinpoint?

[fat jez]

In my experience, the new Raptors are pretty quiet generally, although you can hear the seek noise. The Samsungs I have used are also very quiet and the seek noise is quieter, but there is not that much in it. However, the performance of the Raptors is better (IMHO) than the Spinpoints.

Cheers,
Stephen

[MantisCSS]

any chance anyone cud help me find the "quiestest" raptor going for as cheap as possible!?! 74GB

[Agent]

but there are a couple of other things standard in the Sata II spec, NCQ, etc....

Surprisingly, NCQ isn’t a SATA2 requirement spec, and is entirely optional !

[stmok]

found out my hard drive is f****ed!!! so which do u think i shoudl replace ti with?? i want speed, something liek a raptor but it is a bit £££

You're talking about two different classes of drives.

One is aimed for server/workstation environments as a cost effective alternative to SCSI solutions, the other is a desktop solution.

Personally, I would go for the Raptor. Mainly because its designed/made with stricter requirements than the Spinpoint. (as in Raptor is designed to operate 24/7 enterprise environments, while typical desktop drives like the Spinpoint are aimed for the usual "8 hours per day" operation).

Go for the newer Raptors with 16MB cache (only in 74GB and 150GB forms), they are 3dBA quieter than the older ones when idle. But they consume about 1W more power. (I notice they're available now in Australia, but I'm not sure about anywhere else...So check around!)

[MantisCSS]

so this one, u recomend? http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Product...roductID=14017 is that a good price also?
it also seems to be that the 16 MB cahce is slower than the 8 MB cache?