Any competition to WD Raptors?

[slackerinabox]

I'm looking to get a hard drive to use as a main system drive - 40-80 gb would be fine.. But raptors are a bit expensive... Anything else out there as fast (or nearly as fast) for for less $$? I do video editing so need a fast drive.

Thanks!

 

[Matthias99]

No, not really (at least for single drives). You might be able to get a deal on some older 10KRPM SCSI drives if you hunt around.

If you need high STR for video editing, use RAID0 with 7200RPM drives and/or multiple arrays/drives. WAY faster than a single Raptor when working with very large files, at much less $/GB.

 

[AwesomeJay]

Our tests have also shown us that the 10,000RPM Raptor can offer a noticeable, but not dramatic, performance improvement over the current generation 7200RPM 8MB cache drives. While the performance improvement is there, it's not as significant as the synthetic tests would have you believe.

taken from Article here on Anandtech

 

[Rapsven]

AwesomeJay, please note that regular desktop activity does not include video editing, it's very IO intensive.

 

[slackerinabox]

is a 7200rpm raid 0 really faster than a raptor?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212
is a 7200rpm raid 0 really faster than a raptor?

Define "faster". A Raptor has a lower seek time, but the RAID0 would have a higher STR.

 

[w00t]

maxline 3
and seagates new 7,200.8

both have 16mb buffer but seagates 16mb isnt out yet

 

[mechBgon]

is a 7200rpm raid 0 really faster than a raptor?

It could be, in a straight-line sprint anyway. When it comes to seek times, however... How heavy are we talking, on the video editing? Methinks it can't be too heavy, if you're ok with as little as 40GB of storage capacity.

 

[slackerinabox]

Originally posted by: mechBgon

is a 7200rpm raid 0 really faster than a raptor?

It could be, in a straight-line sprint anyway. When it comes to seek times, however... How heavy are we talking, on the video editing? Methinks it can't be too heavy, if you're ok with as little as 40GB of storage capacity.

Well, I have a 250 gb hd for storage - I just need a system drive for windows and the temp files (the avis will be archived afterwards to the 250 gb drive)

 

[mechBgon]

Are you actually I/O-limited with the drive you're using now?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: freedomsbeat212

Originally posted by: mechBgon

is a 7200rpm raid 0 really faster than a raptor?

It could be, in a straight-line sprint anyway. When it comes to seek times, however... How heavy are we talking, on the video editing? Methinks it can't be too heavy, if you're ok with as little as 40GB of storage capacity.

Well, I have a 250 gb hd for storage - I just need a system drive for windows and the temp files (the avis will be archived afterwards to the 250 gb drive)

I had missed that you wanted to use this as a system drive. That's not really an ideal setup for video editing, in my experience.

What you *want* is to have it so that a) you're only doing one thing on a single physical drive at a time, and b) when you're encoding or converting or merging files, that the input and output files are on different physical drives. Disk drives are MUCH faster when they can read or write sequentially than when they have to jump all over the place to service multiple requests at the same time.

A Raptor is probably the best choice for a system/swapfile drive, as its seek time is very low and it will be able to open programs and do assorted O/S tasks more rapidly than other disks (besides 15KRPM SCSI). If I was building an editing workstation, I would then have several hard drives (or, ideally, RAID0 arrays, but this would require PCI-X or PCIe to have adequate bandwidth to/from main memory) solely as storage for intermediate/temp files, and a large mirrored (RAID1/0+1/5) array for archival. That way you could capture to one temp disk/array, then edit/convert/encode between the temp disks/arrays, then copy it to the mirrored array once you were done. However, that might be way overkill for your needs.