raptor 74 or standard hdd

[baby_ice]

as title says, should i go for a raptor 74 or a normal 250 sata HDD.

I was going to use the raptor for windows and buy another HDD for storage in time.

Or....................

Just use a 250 gig and section a part of for windows

[Neil-UKWSD]

Hi,

I was making this same decision just last week, I finally opted to get the 74GB Raptor for use as my boot drive with windows and anything else that can be a bit slugish to load up (BF2).

I also picked up a couple of 250GB Samsung's for data and other apps/games that load fine.

I can't comment on any noticable difference as I've yet to build the PC with these new drives in, had to send the case back and awaiting CPU. However from what I had read the raptors make a difference and speed up boot and loading times.

[rox0r]

I have a 74Gb Raptor as boot and a Spinpoint 250Gb SATA as storage. The Raptor is indeed noticably faster than the Spinpoint for load times and so on.

To be honest though, I'd rather have a 150Gb Raptor and ditch both, I don't use all the storage space on the Spinpoint and the 150Gb is slightly improved in performance over the 74Gb.

[baby_ice]

ok, i think ive made my mind up, now for silence, do them harddrive silent thingis work?

[rox0r]

I have the Raptor in a SilentMaxx hard drive enclosure and yes they do work. It doesn't entirely kill the seek noise but it takes it down to a level close to an exposed Spinpoint.

[Smokey21]

If you have the cash, and the rest of the system is powerful, then go for it, if not, don't bother, your better of spending the cash elsewhere, on a more powerful CPU/GPU, or better mobo, etc.

[baby_ice]

ok well the rest of my system will be / is

biostar, the T4 sli one.
1 gig of gold ocz ram
6600 GT graphics
freezer pro 64
hyper type R

going to add a 3800 x2 i think, and overclock.

is that system not worthy of a raptor

[whoatethepies]

Depends on what you use it for, but you'd probably see more benefit from an extra GB of RAM. That way the HDD won't have to access as much once data is cached, and thus the HDD speed becomes less important. Won't help during Windows bootup, but would help during games etc..

[RECOiL™]

74gb raptors rock, although my first one died in under a year, got another one and it seems fine. if you have a load of memery, dont have a pagefile and you will see nice performance, if you dont have much memory, then bung pagefil on disk 2.

install all the big stuff straight after install of windows, so it will always load quick and defrag will always bung it at beginning of disk

[xbo]

IMO Raptors are overpriced. Sure you may see a small decrease in boot/load times, but in all honestly how often do you reboot your computer? I'm sure the extra 10seconds once a day isn't going to kill you and you'd be better off putting the extra cash towards something else.

BF2 really does run much better on 2GB RAM and will improve performance much more than a fast HDD.

[RECOiL™]

IMO Raptors are overpriced. Sure you may see a small decrease in boot/load times, but in all honestly how often do you reboot your computer? I'm sure the extra 10seconds once a day isn't going to kill you and you'd be better off putting the extra cash towards something else.

BF2 really does run much better on 2GB RAM and will improve performance much more than a fast HDD.

Me personally, I dont reboot my pc that much, but I play alot of css and other games were long loading times can become annoying. It also helps to keep your system as speedy as possible, so raptors ftw - altho me being a cheapskate i would say they could do coming down in price now, certainly the 36gb

[baby_ice]

I'm getting a 36 raptor for 30 quid.

[dangel]

I opted for a cheap SATA Raid 0 array - two drives way cheaper than one raptor and either way i'd use an external USB drive for backing up.

[aidanjt]

for a system disk, raptors are perfect.. but they aint cheap, for storage.. useless, unless you have a RAID 5 controller with a big stack of them in a server that needs to be fast and reliable. In which case performance and reliablity needs to be sky high regardless of cost.

[RECOiL™]

Well my setup is as follows :

primary drive 74gb raptor - windows / apps / games
secondary drive 250gb sata - dvdrs / pr0n / downloads

I have an 80gb external usb drive, which im going to use for backing up of my primary.

[aidanjt]

Well my setup is as follows :

primary drive 74gb raptor - windows / apps / games
secondary drive 250gb sata - dvdrs / pr0n / downloads

I have an 80gb external usb drive, which im going to use for backing up of my primary.

That's good, I have:

System disk - 74gb raptor, Windows/Linux
Secondary - 74gb raptor*, 40gb NTFS partition for page file, and fast/temporary storage, Linux swap, /home
External USB - 250gb 'overspill' storage, I got this for storing downloads because my fileserver is bunged
Network - Linux server (1x120gb system disk, 2x160gb md raid0 data), stores just about everything, planning to replace the server with a new PCIe Intel board, an Arcea RAID5 controller, and get 3 750gb sata disks, that should hold up for awhile, and i can just add disks as time goes on.

* Note: I decided not to go RAID0 because of BIOS RAID incompatability cross platform and the performance enhancement isn't massive on these types of controllers.