Raid or Raptor?

DamoKen

Ok, all the parts for my new build have finally arrived so going to start building tomorrow if I get the chance or Sunday.

Anyway, to cut it short, it's going to be a high end machine, quad core 6600, 8800GTS 640, 680i chipset aimed primarily at gaming, java development and photoshop so trying to decide which would be the better.

I've got a 3 year old 74GB raptor in my old machine, I've also ordered 2 spinpoint 500GB drives for the new machine. To be honest I've never noticed a massive improvement in boot times etc with the raptor, have had a dual boot between that and a barracuda for the last while due to the machine falling over a fair bit and haven't seen a big difference between the 2 booting.

Also the size has always annoyed me, install a few big games and heavy duty apps and half my hard drive is gone!

From what I've read the boot times are Raptors main speed advantage over a raid 0 setup. The disadvantage obviously being the size of the drive versus cost.

Raid 0 setups though supposedly outperform the Raptor past boot, and are recommended by many forums for gaming.

So would I be better just starting from scratch here and setting up the 2 spinpoints in raid, straight away benefiting from the huge increase in available storage, and (hopefully) not seeing any performance drop in gaming?

cheers

RoyalMarine

dont think you will see any drop in performance in gaming. the main benefits of a faster harddrive are load times. not in game performance.

personally i always preferred raid over raptors. hated the fact they were only 74gb. but then nowadays they are bigger so.....
but as you said yourself you never saw any jaw dropping improvement when using a raptor.

Anti

raptors are amazing, i have 2 36gb versions. They load everything so quick. The 150gb raptorx is actually the slowest of the raptors, a 500gb samsung spinpoint is actually quicker.

awhir

Anti wrote:

raptors are amazing, i have 2 36gb versions. They load everything so quick. The 150gb raptorx is actually the slowest of the raptors, a 500gb samsung spinpoint is actually quicker.

Lol where did you pull that from atm the raptor 150 is the fastest sata hdd you can get.

see the new seagate 1tb hdd its got 325gb platters :eek: :eek: :eek:

dealgan

i have 2 36gb raptors in raid0 as system.

Best of both worlds. Raptors & raid.

DamoKen

cheers for all the replies guys, think I'll go with the spin point raid, I'll take the 500GB over 74GB and see if I notice any drop

StRiKeR

I too run 2x36 raptors in raid0 also 2x 750 WD in raid0 for storage. they run well, load times farely quick.

L31mr0d

Anti wrote:

raptors are amazing, i have 2 36gb versions. They load everything so quick.

I SOOO miss those raptors I have a RAID setup using 2x320GB WD SE16 SATA 3Gbps drives, and I can definitely notice the performance drop. Not in games, but load times and install times are a lot longer, a good minute or 2. I usually install my games from *cough* backup ISO's, so they aren't being slowed down by the physical optical drive.

Also I frequently compress and decompress rar archives in the order of 4GB's to 8GB's, and the performance drop is VERY noticable. The decompress time has almost doubled in some cases.

But as you can imagine, capacity trumps all now, and the raptors, even though they are amazing, just can't keep up with anymore. I couldn't see the point of having a raptor raid and then having to store all my files on a slower SATA2 drive

SwampThing

I've two 150GB Raptors in RAID 1 for the OS disk and two 500GB diamond max in RAID 1 for data.

If I had the decision to make again, I'd buy 4 x 500GB diamond max and set them up in RAID 10.

I can't see any huge gain from the raptors. I do a fair bit of video encoding, DVD ripping etc. and that's the kind of thing where fast disk access is a big bonus.

My 2c for what it's worth.

requiem1

After going from raid to raid i finally bought a raptor and i have no regrets. I had two(raptorx 150) in raid 0 for a while but gave one to my dad cause there wasn't a massive performace difference between having two in raid and one on its own

8T8

I generally see it as

RAID 0 gives you
performance
very large capacity
increased risk of disk failure (if disk fails in array you lose all data)

Raptor gives you
performance
modest capacity
higher cost

So there are pro's and con's to both unless you are quite rigorous in backing up your data I would go with the raptor 150 as your primary HD and get a large HD for storage use.

Anti

awhir wrote:

Lol where did you pull that from atm the raptor 150 is the fastest sata hdd you can get.

see the new seagate 1tb hdd its got 325gb platters :eek: :eek: :eek:

By using Hdtach.

Also, customPC did a huge indepth hard drive review a few months ago, and the 500gb samsung spinpoint was faster then the 150gb raptorX