Are faster hard drives really faster?

[No.72]

Surely if you want a fast pc you get the fastest thing you can as long as its not way too expensive, raptor's don't seem to be miles more expensive, and hard drives are not that expensive anyway.

[BlindMelon7]

I agree with the above but I have to say I feel a little bit guilty about spending money just because I'm impaciant (sp?). Funnily enough I'm a very calm and slow person in real life. What does THAT say about modern technology lol

[Clunk]

Another thing I forgot to mention is that if you have an aluminium case that doesnt have any kind of damping, then the hard drive vibration and chatter is significantly louder. My case is bad for it, but I had this same raptor in a V1000 case and it was only as loud as an old maxtor, if a little bit higher pitched.

[BlindMelon7]

I just got my rapter set up. It sounds like milkshake being sucked through a straw! I have to admit that its a bit overated. You can hardly notice the difference. Its just a really small overpriced hard drive

[No.72]

What is it like when loading a game? how much quicker is it? and what size raptors have you got?

[this_is_gav]

You don't really appreciate Raptors until you do without one. Going to work was a right pain waiting 4 months on Photoshop and InDesign and things loading.

[BUFF]

I had more 36Gb Raptors fail on me than any other drive & tbh I didn't really notice the difference in anything other than a slightly quicker game/level load.
Imo the extra cost/Gb wasn't worth the performance to me let alone the failure issue so I stopped using them & sold my RMA replacements.
Ymmv though.

[BlindMelon7]

I've really noticed the consistency on them though. When I'm doing recordings that is. With normal hard drives you sometimes get little noises when recording large files. With this you don't. Then again its only 35gb so you cant really record big files anyway .

Btw I hadn't de-fraged it before. Its much faster now.

[Clunk]

set an antivirus scan going...should be much faster

[BlindMelon7]

Its doing about 150 files a second!

Edit: Make that 250

[Clunk]

is the noise getting on your nerves yet?

[BlindMelon7]

I've put a duvet and a load of pillows over my computer (no joke). Don't worry. I take them off every few hours to let it cool down

[YorkieBen]

Once you have everything else as high as you're willing to go a raptor is worth it. If you want a really noticeable difference in seed get two in a RAID0. The entire PC will feel much faster and you'll be the first person in every server, every time.

are you sure this is true. I remember seeing a while ago in a pc mag showing that for most things RAID 0 was not much of a speed boost and in some aspects was slower.

Same with the raptor, a samsung 250gb was faster in some things than a raptor

[kalniel]

It's more about what you call 'speed'

RAID 0 is really good for large sequential reads/writes. So especially noticable if you're doing video work etc. However it's not all that great for random access where the seek latency is a bigger factor.

In those cases fast RPM drives like raptors generally do well because the seek latency is lower. If the platter size is large enough then raptors can also give a good performance on large sequential read/writes, but the gap comes down for these when comparing small raptors to much larger platter devices.

[Yellowbeard]

At one point, you could buy an 80gb Samsung SATA HD for less than $100 US. 2 of those in a RAID-0 striipe were almost as fast as a Raptor RAID-0 setup. And, it cost MUCH less. So, you could buy your choice of any 2 matching HDs and RAID them. They would be faster than any single Raptor, cost much less, and also you'd have a huge fast storage array. Seagte 320gb drives are very reasonable these days.

[this_is_gav]

At one point, you could buy an 80gb Samsung SATA HD for less than $100 US. 2 of those in a RAID-0 striipe were almost as fast as a Raptor RAID-0 setup.

As Kalniel described, only in sequential reads. The more important access times are where Raptors hold their own, and no matter how good a 7,200rpm drive is, it can't access a part of the disk faster than a 10,000rpm one.

NCQ drives can access 2 concurrent parts of the drives a bit more efficiently, but it still doesn't make up for it, and of course, modern Raptors also have NCQ anyway.