EvaUnit02 on 30/12/2008 at 16:55
Is there any real noticeable practical benefits of 10,000RPM hard drives (ie WD Raptor's), specifically if you aren't planning on having any RAID arrays? Eg would poorly optimised games with long times regardless of hardware grunt, like Thief: DS and DX:IW, benefit?
On paper, the high price tags and relatively small amounts of space make them sound quite unappealing TBH.
bikerdude on 30/12/2008 at 18:52
WD150 veloceraptor
The pro's
fast - 130mb/s read/write
quick - sub 8ms access times
The con's
Loud - 10k rpms produce a noticeble whine
noisey - the seek noise on these drives is very noticable
hot - these drive can reach temps of 60c+
The price - the WD150 reptor is £150-200+ per/drive
Do what i did...
3x Seagate barracuda's 320GB ST3220613AS
The pro's
Fast - 115mb/s read/write, p/drive (Im getting 300MB/s+ in my raid 0)
Quick - sub 11ms access times (im getting sub 8ms in raid 0)
Quiet - very very quiet, even doing a full on defrage - completely inaudable
Cool - these drive run at 30c all day long.
Price - I paid £120 for all 3...!!!
Bonus - these drive are 1/2 the height of a normal drive (same drive normal height eg. ST3220620AS)
Extra - these drives are half the weight or a normal drive, see above.
The Cons
The ST3220613AS model is hard to find, but the ST3220620AS(see above) more readily available,
Renzatic on 31/12/2008 at 15:56
What Bikerdude said. I bought a Raptor 30Gb for far more than I should've paid for a drive that size about a year ago. The speed difference is noticable, though it isn't nearly enough to justify the price tag.
Nowadays I use it for a Windows backup drive, and have two run of the mill 7200 SATA 3.0 drives in my comp.
TBE on 2/1/2009 at 07:15
I have an older 74GB Raptor, and it's not really loud like everyone says. It does start the system up faster than the 7200 RPM drives I've tried, but the space available for storage sucks. I've got it this week as my system drive, but I'm going back to the RAID 0 setup I've been running for a long time.
The modern 7200 RPM drives coming out now are almost as fast as the 10000 RPM ones for data transfer rates. Not as fast, but close enough for your purposes. Unless money is no object, just get yourself a couple cheap 7200 RPM drives and run them in a RAID 0 for speed, and have another drive available for backups. I currently have two 500 GB drives in a RAID 0 array, with 3 other drives for more storage and backups.
Thief DS didn't load any faster on the Raptor versus the 7200 RPM drive I used to have. Don't confuse the older Raptors with the newer tech of the (
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html) VelociRaptors. The newer ones are a bit faster. But even if you don't want to run a RAID, a 7200 RPM modern drive will empower you with much space and enough speed.
