Anyone Here Have Dual Raptors?

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: Heen05
Oh, can you reccomend what you WOULD get if they werent worth it?

I have a 36GB raptor and I notice barely any difference between it and my 120GB Maxtor w/ 8MB cache. I felt like I had wasted $165CDN after I purchased it.

I would reccomend just about any 7200RPM 8MB cache SATA drive over the raptors. 160-200GB drives seem to be the sweet spot lately.

There is about a 25-30% performance increase between the Raptor I and Raptor II's; Average transfers between the drives are about 45MB /s vs about 65MB/s, respectively, so a single Raptor I is not the "ideal" anymore (I'm running one myself as well).

Reviews of the Raptor II showing the (significant) difference between it and it's older brother here, here, here and here . All are good reads and have their own spin on the issue. All conclude that the Raptor II significantly improves on the first one.

I also bought a Raptor I for about $150 CDN; I am pretty impressed with the speed myself, however - boot times and seek times are much quicker than before (Maxtor Diamondmax 9 SATA is the other drive I run and the former boot drive; no slouch itself). However, it definately isn't earth-shatteringly different. I'm looking into getting a Raptor II though, after reading the reviews .

The real deal for now is running two Raptor I or II's in RAID or a single Raptor II; single Raptor I's don't significantly outshine current 7200 RPM drives anymore (except in seek time). It's essentially a toss up between two Raptor I's or a single Raptor II for similar money right now; the RAID array will give you faster transfers and will be much better for video/audio editing/encoding, while the single 74GB drive is better suited for general windows usage.