Raptor's eh?

Woden

been getting interested recently by all this raid talk going on, the system i have is as in sig and i fancy on tipping up a few bits on in during the summer to keep me ticking over if i can get a bit of money together, dvd burner or external hdd, new monitor and another half gig of ram.

anywho what i was just thinking about was those fancy raptor drives out. are they worth it, i'm familar with the general specs and extra cost per gig but is there much noticeable performance over a 7200rpm drive.

would i be better off for example with with one raptor and my current drive not raided.

or getting another one of my current drives and raiding them both.

or going the whole hog and getting 2 raptors (selling a kidney) and raiding and then perhaps just using the seagate as a back up or setting it up for external storage.

opinions please

data

po0k

They're low-end SCSI disk mechanisms with SATA front-end electronics.

The 74Gig models go like the bejaysus.

And have a 5 year warranty.

Dempsey

I thought the raptor interface was a converted from PATA.

They are very quick. I have a 36.6Gb one and im going to get another. Data, get the 74Gb version because they are quetier or 2 x 36.6Gb. Ihavent much storage space left one my one 36Gb, which is a pain in the ass.

sutty

Originally posted by Dataisgod
been getting interested recently by all this raid talk going on, the system i have is as in sig and i fancy on tipping up a few bits on in during the summer to keep me ticking over if i can get a bit of money together, dvd burner or external hdd, new monitor and another half gig of ram.

anywho what i was just thinking about was those fancy raptor drives out. are they worth it, i'm familar with the general specs and extra cost per gig but is there much noticeable performance over a 7200rpm drive.

would i be better off for example with with one raptor and my current drive not raided.

or getting another one of my current drives and raiding them both.

or going the whole hog and getting 2 raptors (selling a kidney) and raiding and then perhaps just using the seagate as a back up or setting it up for external storage.

opinions please

data

I my-self would wait a while and see how they work in the long run. I'd get some cheep secondhand SCSI stuffs and that would sort you out. I'm getting the SCSI 160 Drive and Controler off the for sale board. At the moment I only have a ultra SCSI drive and controler. They make the system fast enough with a great seaktime. But the 160 will be mad, and half the seaktime as the one I have in the system at the moment.

Col_Loki

Would be thinkin along the lines of raptors myself, i will be doing very little upgrading over the summer due mainly to the big change in tech. Top of my list if i do upgrade a little is prob raptors......... very interested in what people think and how they perform .

Noise isint as much of an issue, they'll be accompanyin 2 WD's which are going to be much louder. Any links handy of a good review?

po0k

www.storagereview.com

Col_Loki

Cheers SyxPak , thats one of the best sites ive seen for harddrive reviews......... alot of reading to be done

Azza

Well I have a raptor and they seem good but honesty I can't say much. My upgrade over my old computer with possibly 5200rpm hard drive and poor 512ram and amd xp 2000 was done with the upgrade to my current machine. Obviously the system runs alot faster but I can't say how much of the speed belongs to the raptor. Perhaps when I upgrade again next month I will preform some tests to determine its potential on raid 0 against 7200rpm drives on raid 0. Windows Xp installs in under 7 mins while another person I know on a raid set up got it done in 5 on dual 7200rpm hard drives. Interesting to note boot time is longer than average on my machine and I have tweaked it several ways to speed up but to no avail. Found when I installed window xp 64 it booted up much faster. Must be a feature of AMD 64 cpu's. Takes near a minute to boot up in 32bit but round 35 secs with 64 bit.

Dingatron

The raptors are excellent. I've 2 x 36 GB Raid 0 as system drive and they go like the clappers. Got them from Komplett for €120 each a while ago. Very quite too. If you do a lot of ripping etc. their well worth it. The 74 GB ones are even better but pricey. Highly recomend them. XP pro only gets to half of the first bar before it boots.:D

tman

would i have any difficulties booting from a raid array if the controller was a pci one, rather than onboard?

tempted to get a couple of raptors & a sata card for meh burfdeh

Woden

Originally posted by ding
XP pro only gets to half of the first bar before it boots.:D

jesus i think mine goes through about 10 bars.

Dingatron

Yeah. I thought I was seeing things first time it booted! Their worth the money for that alone. Must get some Hd Tach readings for you to drool over.;) Still not sure if they are fully optimised either. There's a few options when setting them up regarding cluster size and I just picked default. Think it requires a reformat to change them so I haven't messed with them yet.

Venom

I picked up a 74GB Raptor a few months back and its pretty nice

Word of warning tho, they make a fair bit of noise in a clicky accessing files way. Only have one at the moment but Im planning on getting another to raid 0 them

neokenzo

I think its the RAID that does the half bar boot thing. I remembered happened to me as well. Since then and a lot of junk afterwards its about 1-2 bar. It takes about 5-8 seconds to load to windows from the moment the boot up screen appears.

tman

****ing hell!
you're all mad in the head!
i'd assumed that a 74gb raptor would cost about €100-€150...
think i'll just get myself a 200gb seagate drive & another 512mb ram instead tbh

Dingatron

Word of warning tho, they make a fair bit of noise in a clicky accessing files way.

Interesting. The 2 X 37GB Raptors don't make much noise at all. They are quiter than the 80 GB Maxtor I have for data storage. Think two 37 Gb in raid are better value performance wise for your money than one 74 GB.

hostyle

Originally posted by tman
you're all mad in the head!

This is pretty much the OverClockers / Modders forum. That everyone in here is "mad in the head" is a given

Woden

Originally posted by ding
Think two 37 Gb in raid are better value performance wise for your money than one 74 GB.

yeah i'd be interesting in knowing that for sure as i don't think my wallet will ever stretch to two 74 jobbies.

Dingatron

Data. I'll bench my RAID 0 setup with Hd tach if someone else can do the same with a single 74 GB raptor. Post results tomorrow. Have to bear in mind that as I said earlier it may not be at its optimal level.

Woden

ta very much thats appreciated ding.

perhaps venom if you would be so kind as well?

Dingatron

Right. Here's my results from HD Tach. Any one else got some I'd like to see them as I reckon theres room for improvement.

Woden

cheers for that ding

here mine on the seagate



i don't know whats up with that large dip on it at 22gb but its consistent when repeated as are the other values such as the cpu utilization. anyone any ideas?

data

Dingatron

Noticed that dip as well. Mines in around the same place. What do you reckon to the raid figures? I'm happy with the investment anyway. Must update the raid drivers, reformat blah blah etc and give it another go. Not that bored to do it just yet though.:D

Woden

nice access time anyway i presume that comes from the 10k rpm drive?

plus the fact that you have double the read speed of my single drive thats kinda sweet.

i wonder though if its worth the investment. perhaps another 160gb seagate and just raid the two of them i would probably get 70mbps?

po0k

From my scant readings on the raptors a while back the 74Gig has a more "optimised" firmware and/or head mechanism, ie it's access patterns are more aggressive, so it jerks about a bit more, makes more noise but it does have a bit of an improved set of cross-draw/half-draw/seek latencies or something.

Still, if I have the cash when I'm buidling my new machine I'll be putting two 36Gig raptors in RAID0 for system, games and proggies, maybe synching up to an 80Gig 7200rpm drive every night aswell...

For mass storage, maybe a 4-disk raid0+1 or raid5 (if I can pick up a raid5 card for cheap).

Why can't more consumer boards have PCIX slots?

Woden

due the synching to the 80gig drive allow back in case anything goes wrong is it?

is this one of the other forms of raid, like mirror or something?

po0k

No, more like a Norton Ghost backup, but only updates the files that were changed.
And it's only done once every night, it's not continuous.
Dunno if it would really be needed though, aside from save games etc. anything on the raptors culd be lost and I wouldn't really be too put out.
Though it would be nice to RMA the disk (whilst working off the 80gig) and then rebuild the array and plonk the image back on as though nothing happened

Woden

practically as well i only have to onboard s-ata type things so i would either need a card or some type of s-ata to ide convertor for my current drive.

also how would i go about backing up the stuff on my current s-ata drive which has windows. for example i presume i'd want to be putting windows on the raptors. would i be able to boot from them then still access the other windows setup and transfer my documents temporarily onto the raptors. then format the large hdd and put the files back in case anything happend to the array?

po0k

Yes.

tman

if i installed xp & the relevant sata drivers, made an image with ghost & then wrote that image to a sata drive. would it work?

(using sata drivers during xp setup sounds like a pain in the ass)

Venom

Originally posted by Dataisgod
ta very much thats appreciated ding.

perhaps venom if you would be so kind as well?

Sure I'll give it a spin when i get home. Im not in a raid setup yet tho so I think my results will suck donkey balls

I also noticed the price of the 74gb raptor has jumped up a good bit. Totaly cost from komplett for the first one was €250 and this included shipping and all other charges. Now its €250 just for the drive

Matt Simis

Originally posted by ding
Data. I'll bench my RAID 0 setup with Hd tach if someone else can do the same with a single 74 GB raptor. Post results tomorrow. Have to bear in mind that as I said earlier it may not be at its optimal level.

Dont think anyone else posted the 74GB Raptor result, Ill do so later. Im using HDTach 3 Beta.


Matt

Col_Loki

Ok heres mine, 2x160gb SATA Samsungs 8mb Raid0 . Im not that impressed but eh there quiet. Suppose it could be worse .

Cluster size @ 16k, Strip size @ 16k, new drivers & BIOS.

Dempsey

The Sequential speed looks erratic, have ya defragged the drives?

Woden

access time seems a bit on the high side as well i would think?

Col_Loki

The Sequential speed looks erratic, have ya defragged the drives?

New install, a couple of days ago!!

access time seems a bit on the high side as well i would think?

Yea a little dissapointing, am not an expert on hard drives or Raid setups but that doesent look nice :rolleyes: . Compared to the results they got with 2xsamsungs Raid0........ Here , mine dont look so bad (cept for access times). Think they had crappy settings for that benchmark (different size cluster & strip, older drivers etc etc).

Im not sure what i can really do TBH, is it the drives fault or the controller?

Woden

perhaps there is someone else on boards with a samsung that could bench to eliminate the card perhaps?

Matt Simis

Here is my almost full Raptor 74GB (single) vs another drive in my system, a Maxtor 80GB ATA133 8MB cache.



Matt

neokenzo

Here's my RAID0 on Promise Controller.

Col_Loki

Hey neo, you should be scoring more than that....... try it again and it should change. Did you set the cluster size when formatting the harddisks? This had a big impact on my performance.......

The Raptor looks good, but thats not much of a supprise is it .

Dingatron

Changed my NTFS cluster to 16k as it defaults to 4k on os install. Defragged and heres the results. I was a bit disapointed with max and average but the minimum is a lot better. CPU utilisation seems a bit high? But its not that bad.:cool:

po0k

How do you change cluster size when formatting with standard Windows installer?
Or what program do you use?
I can't say i remember PM8 having any settings.

Matt Simis

Originally posted by ding
Changed my NTFS cluster to 16k as it defaults to 4k on os install. Defragged and heres the results. I was a bit disapointed with max and average but the minimum is a lot better. CPU utilisation seems a bit high? But its not that bad.:cool:

Youre disappointed with 86MB/s average transfer speed!?

Also, I second SyxPaks question.


Matt

Dingatron

Best way is to use PM8. Select the drive and when you right click there is an option 'cluster' or something like that. Select cluster size and away you go. Not for the faint hearted though. Make sure you have backup etc. It took around 1 hour for the resize 74 GB . There's a good guide here posted on the other raid performance thread.

Youre disappointed with 86MB/s average transfer speed!?

Well there's always room for improvement. I've heard of guys getting 100MB/s with simular setups.

Col_Loki

You can also set the cluster size by booting from an IDE drive (or other SATA drive thats not going to be raided) going to control pannel, admin tools, computer management, logical drives, right click on the Raid drive and pick format.......... you will be asked to set the cluster size (default strip size is 16k, so setting 16k cluster size is advised also ).

Bit of a pain but was a big help performance wise to me!!