WD Raptor - worth the extra cost?

[philipbain]

I've been looking at my options for upgrading my PC and one aspect i've looked at is hard drives. As I like to push my systems with games and media encoding would a Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive give enough benefit to justify it's not inconsiderable cost?

[aidanjt]

You wont notice any difference with media encoding as that tends to be more CPU limited than anything else... but games should benifit with shorter loading times, faster paging to virtual memory.. but i'd honestly have to say that if you're going to upgrade antyhing, it's got to be the ram, 512MB doesn't be long getting gobbled up these days, especially with newish games, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to look for an S754 Athlon 64 CPU from ebay too.

[Hans Voralberg]

Yeah games loading is faster, about 20 secs faster I think ?

[NightshadowUK]

They are cool drives to have but like aidanjt said, you should look into more RAM first and maybe a cheap CPU - the benefit from those will far outweight what you'd get from a Raptor.

[vicar]

Would a raptor make any difference to the efficiency of a server, workstation, or for video editing.

[Smokey21]

Not much difference to be honest. Especially with 16mb cache, faster HD's like Seagate's 7200.10's.

[Butcher]

Might make some diff for the server if it gets a reasonable amount of traffic, other than that, no.

[Rabs]

In short yes!

I run 2 x 150GB Raptors in RAID 0 - upgraded from 2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 which wasn't slow anyway.

Theres various stats etc to say that RAID 0 doesn't make much difference - however after running RAID 0 arrays for over 4 years now I wouldn't go back.

As for the 7200.10 - I have personally found that the PATA 7200.8 etc to be quieter than the SATA 7200.8/7200.9 for some reason.

For more info on the 7200.10 read this review: Clicky

[aidanjt]

Would a raptor make any difference to the efficiency of a server, workstation, or for video editing.

For Video *editing* yes, if you make a habit of scanning through more than a few minutes in Premiere or some such.. Servers, absolutely if an (ide based) server is loaded enough to warrent it.. a Raptor with /var and swap on it would make a fairly relaible and fast performing server

[Veles]

I would agree with the others and say, yes a raptor would improve your general experience if you put windows and programs running off it (and it's nicely defragged of course)...but you really should put the money elsewhere on your system, a CPU upgrade to at least a single core Athlon 64 and ugraded to 1Gb of RAM would give you much better performance increase.

[philipbain]

Thanks for the feedback, as it is i'm completely gutting my system and am probably going to get a Core 2 Duo anyhow, probably going to go with a decent 7200rpm drive as it means that i'll have more cash to spend else where in the system, figured that having more RAM would be more beneficial as there would be less need to page to virtual memory anyway.

[Zak33]

i've done this exact thing recently.

First I did two SATA drives in raid.....two Seagate 72000 RPM drives. It was faster than a single sata drive for long winded stuff but windows was slower in a lot of stuff. But the sadest thing is the rampant fragmentation of the drives. Even in 1 day, the machine gets a tad slower as it gets spread out.

However.....I went to a Raptor drive for windows and used one of the other sata drives for data and music. It has been a revelation.

XP on the raptor,with all the actual software loaded to it, means that software loads faster and xp boots quicker. But having the data, music and films on the other drive means that drive is the one you defrag regularly.

The best improvement I've found using this system is that I can record game footage using fraps t the spare drive, but if the game needs other files in the mean time, they can be accessed through the other sata drive.

I'd suggest that the 36 gig raptor is not a good choice new, but would be good second hand. Recently Raptors have gone ot SATA300, which is totoally irrelevent, as SATA 150 raptors still destroy other sata 300 drives.

I've done what you have thought of, and even gone raid, but a single raptor has made my entire XP experience better. Period. But use a second cheaper sata drive for your data/music/medi files etc.