WD Raptor Drives, are they still worth it?

[MuscleFlex]

I was browsing eBay last week and came across raptor drives and surprised to see that the prices have come down now on 2nd hand ones...
Around £50 for a 150gb raptor...

are they still worth it?
i remember i so wanted one of them 3 yrs ago!

I was gonna get a 60gb ssd for my C drive but at present, my 100gb partitioned C drive is almost full already and I don't even have much installed on it.

[shaithis]

£50 for 150GB Raptor just does not seem worth it to me.....especially when I presume that is warranty-less.

Can you not slim that 100GB down?

[abaxas]

Yes and no.

Yes due to lower rotational latency, hence better for random access with long term reliability.

No, buy an SSD unless you are runnning a database or vmware.

[foxyrick]

I had a raptor and was almost glad when it died a week out of warranty. It was fast but also by far the loudest HD I've ever had. I wouldn't buy another.

[GoNz0]

i gave mine away when one of the 2 died from my raid array, bloody noisy thing.

[malfunction]

Are you all talking about the older 3.5" drives? The 2.5" one I have here doesn't seem loud at all whereas the old 3.5" ones (I used to work at a place that used a lot of the gen 1 raptors) were really loud - lots of bearing noise even when new

[GoNz0]

yes the 3.5

they have no real place against the current ssd line up though.

[malfunction]

Yes - I'm surprised they haven't come down in price since SSDs became available (current HDD pricing excepted). Will be interesting to see what happens to them longer term - they are very good drives but a good SSD should still be able to run rings around them.

[spoon_]

I have 4 of the 150GB Raptor X ones in R5 array. Love them to bits. Let's don't forget that they are 10k RPM hence the noise and have 5 (!!!) years of warranty...

[MuscleFlex]

2.5 size i'm talking about!

[Behemoth]

My cousin had an 80 gig one, it was replaced every year under RMA as they kept on failing.

[dave87]

I've got two 150gb WD Raptors that I paid around £60 for (for both) which run in RAID0.

Perfectly happy with them, and I think I'd still keep them even if I did go for an SSD of some description. Have the SSD as boot, RAID 0 Raptors as games/programs etc. All my data storage is centralised on my Microserver so the individual machines don't actually need to store that side of things

[MuscleFlex]

I've got two 150gb WD Raptors that I paid around £60 for (for both) which run in RAID0.

Perfectly happy with them, and I think I'd still keep them even if I did go for an SSD of some description. Have the SSD as boot, RAID 0 Raptors as games/programs etc. All my data storage is centralised on my Microserver so the individual machines don't actually need to store that side of things

where did you get 2 for £60?

[Pancake]

I got one on ebay for about £25, a 160GB enterprise one. It was really no faster than a regular drive for anything i do. I sold it and got an SSD, it was the best move i ever made

[Marenghi]

still got my 2 x 74gb raptors. bar the noise (which has to be expected) they're faultless and still going strong 7 years on

[Tattysnuc]

I sold my 36 Gb ones to buy 74 Gb ones, then sold those the buy the 150 gb ones, then sold those to buy the 300gb ones. They are still going very strong (raid0 as always) and, were it not for the speeds of SSD's coming on so strongly the last year (I have 2xRaid 0 M225 128 GB Crucial drives as my main OS drive, and the Raptors are in Raid 0 for my DB dev environments) I would not hesitate to recommend them.

I think they are still worth it, but the larger drives are approaching the performance of these drives.... 2 years later!

You'll never be future proof in this game, but if you buy well, you can certainly avoid falling behind "the curve."