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Completely regret buying Raptor 150GB (long)
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i don't have any games on my system, nor have i ever..... but that said, the OS is on there and it provides a noticeable difference in app load times, defrag times etc. etc. i had the single 74gb raptor for a few weeks before buying the second one. i thought the single raptor was screaming fast before doing the raid0 config. raid0 is retarted fast (IMO)
if i were you, i'd get the second raptor and raid 0 them, and put both your OS and your games on it. as you can see in the benchies, it really does make a difference. i have a couple 200gb seagate sata drives that i use for storage as well.
Extelleron
Diamond Member
If it's that bad......... I'll take it 🙂
Continuity28
Golden Member
Me too. Then I can RAID0 mine. 🙂
No offense, but your benchmarks are worthless. Both HDTach and ATTO are inconsistent lowlevel benchmarks that tell you pretty much nothing about how a storage system will perform during actual usage. Try buying a video card looking at only RAM latency timings and fillrate benchmarks and see where that gets you.
BFG10K
Lifer
I noticed big performance gains from mine.
After I started using it I noticed how much zippier my gaming load times were. The drive is worth every penny IMO.
After I started using it I noticed how much zippier my gaming load times were. The drive is worth every penny IMO.
bob4432
Lifer
i have noticed quite a few people on dfi-street just cmpare benches all day long and build machines to get the best benches. and benches are just that, benches. if you are really unhappy with it, sell it and get 2x74GB raptors and put them into a raid0 setup, just make sure you have a good backup routine.
i've had 36 and 74 gb raptors to test out before. and well, in my opinion raptors are a total waste of money in general. especially with ram as cheap as it is and disk paging not really being much of an issue anymore.
the only really good use for raptors is in an enterprise environment for say a high throughput database or something that needs really fast access. but there are better scsi solutions to that problem. or if you are well, just filthy rich and have to have a raptor as its cost per gig is awful. i mean a 150gb raptor costs as much as a lot of entire budget computers.
the only really good use for raptors is in an enterprise environment for say a high throughput database or something that needs really fast access. but there are better scsi solutions to that problem. or if you are well, just filthy rich and have to have a raptor as its cost per gig is awful. i mean a 150gb raptor costs as much as a lot of entire budget computers.
Continuity28
Golden Member
About paging, that's done regardless of the amount of memory you have. It's done to help free up faster system memory in case programs don't remove the lesser used pages from memory themselves. In this way, performance is enhanced by using the hard drive to store said "lesser" priority pages. Applications tend to commit to more memory than they will need.
But as for $ per GB, you're right, of course... but keep in mind this isn't specifically marketed towards home desktop users. It's meant to be a cheap solution for workstation/server users, that don't want to use the more costly SCSI solutions. WD Raptors are almost assuredly of better manufacturing quality than most/many other desktop drives - rivalling life expectancy times of SCSI hard drives. So the money does go for more than the quick access times. That said, many gamers get them because they ARE the best single SATA drives - for their generation. There isn't another single (not RAID) SATA drive that matches the Raptor 150 right now. When the 74GB version came out, the same was true then.
People always pay a premium for that extra couple %. At least they are getting a quality product for the money though. Especially considering these aren't by any means the most expensive option... Raptors are actually cheap if you compare them to comparable SCSI drives. But since we are focusing on the HOME user market, Raptors are only worth it if you have the money to spend.
Coming late to this thread but read it and had to address something. A few people have stated that WD Raptors were not/are not made/produced for home/gamer use specificaly and were produced to target business/enterprise solutions. This struck me as I recalled reading a lot on the original and now the second generation WD Raptors. Fact is, they were/are made and targeted at gamers/enthusiasts and not toward business/enterprise users.
Per Western Digitals site:
Per Western Digitals site:
Continuity28
Golden Member
Ah but that's the Raptor X, that's a different beast altogether.
The Raptor 150 is marketed towards servers/workstations like I said... the Raptor X however, is the 150 that also has those additional "enhancements" for looks, like the window - that some gamers I guess would enjoy. It's orth mentioning that the X carries a much higher price tag. 😛
It is easy to misunderstand what 0 RAID and faster drives will and won't do for you. You read the specs and see some decrease in read/write times or whatever and this is where the misunderstanding comes in... then the User tries to think this will make the entire system that much faster or close to it and that simply isn't the case for all applications or programs. Your actual results will vary and usually be less dramatic than most hoped for. People who love 0 RAID and faster spinning drives usually love them without considering a few things.
1) There was a period of time where people were doing this sort of upgrade when it took you from one drive format to another. They forgot to consider that part of their perceieved increase in performance was from going from an Ultra drive to a SATA drive. They also forgot that their old drive unit had 2 MB's of cache and the new one has 8 MB's of cache.
2) They forgot to consider that their new build also included more system RAM and a faster CPU.
3) The programs and applications they use hit the hard drive like a crack pipe. This scenario, believe it or not is very rare.
4) See part 6) below.
then on the other side of life, those who ended up hating it forgot to consider such factors as...
1) Did I load the correct RAID drivers? This isn't always as clear as you might think. Load the wrong driver and quite often, it will work so to speak, but not at capaciity.
2) Are they managing the hard drive system correctly now? There are many factors that will affect the final outcome beyond just the physical drives and drivers for same. I purchased a copy of Diskeeper 9.0 Pro and got a full 300 more 3VDMark05 points for the effort. It also defrags much faster. Now, people complain about it actively watching everything in the background slowing things down, but that mode is for the first 24 hours of heavy use of your PC after the program has been installed or for multiple server management. You want to disable that feature for long term use in most cases after giving it a short term ability to see how you generally run your PC.
3) They didn't go from Ultra to a SATA drive or to a faster, more capable overall build while they were at it. This will make the results less impressive.
4) Their particular applications don't hit the hard drive much after loading, so the results again are less than impressive and this is the case most of the time. Few programs or applications use continued referrence to the hard drive simply because as fast as you can make a hard drive, it is dirt slow compared to system RAM.
5) They don't use the computer as a commercial server. they confuse using it as a server for one game with commercial applications and while they do have things in common, it is a matter of degree affecting total performance change over the older technology.
6) System RAM size feeds back on how well your new drive configuration will perform. Hey, wait a minute! I thought you said access time on hard drives was comparatively dirt slow when compared with system RAM?! Yes, but remember, your system as a whole and the system RAM is going to be busy running cousin Billy's programming as well as security programming and whatever other bloat you have running. this is yet another reason why having the magic Gig of RAM or better, all on two sticks is so vital these days.
So, what will a combination of correctly installed and managed 0 RAID and faster drives do for the average user?
1) It will decrease the time from pressing the on buttion for the PC to Cousin Billy's Welcome screen by 2 seconds, yeppers, just like 2 seconds or so! While it will load Cousin Billy's programming faster, it goes through this stage in the bios which is an extra step where it is dealing with setting up the RAID to begin with and that adds time back on. If you are judging by this measure, you will cry in your Cherrios every time!
2) It dramatically reduces format time of the 0 RAID drive and anything loaded the 0 RAID array as far as programs go. Got from a single 2 MB cached 7,200 Ultra drive to a 0 RAID array of 36 GB 10,000 rpm Raptors and you can easily expect to take 1/3 less time loading programs or formatting the drive when compared to how much space you get in the end. Remember, with 0 RAID, not 1 RAID, you get more hard drive space in the end, so take that into consideration as well. With a 1 RAID of two 36 GB Raptors, you end up with 36 or so GB of usable space. with a 0 RAID of two 36 BG Raptors, you end up with like 70 Gigs of usable space.
3) Reduces the loading time of games. Most find this a compelling reason to buy, but in the end, are dissapointed due to the fact that their games weren't all that big to begin with. In general, and this again varies from game to game depending on how it gets loaded, if the game is less than 1 Gig in size fully loaded, you've wasted the capacity of the new hard drive system. Fo bigger games like my combined install of Forgotten Battles/Ace Expansion Pack/Pacific Fighters all loaded up to the 4.04 Patch loads in about 8 seconds. This compares to 32 seconds with the older, single drive.
4) At this point, things start becoming more conditional and obscure. One of about a billion causes of stutter is hard drive performance. Have a game where online play of downloadable skins is enabled and you will have the custom skins show up faster on your PC by having the faster drives. Also, anything that requires even a single look at the hard drive while playing more demanding games will cause a corresponding, sigle bump in stutter, so this is a varialble not just with how demanding a particular game or program is, but how you use it as well.
1) There was a period of time where people were doing this sort of upgrade when it took you from one drive format to another. They forgot to consider that part of their perceieved increase in performance was from going from an Ultra drive to a SATA drive. They also forgot that their old drive unit had 2 MB's of cache and the new one has 8 MB's of cache.
2) They forgot to consider that their new build also included more system RAM and a faster CPU.
3) The programs and applications they use hit the hard drive like a crack pipe. This scenario, believe it or not is very rare.
4) See part 6) below.
then on the other side of life, those who ended up hating it forgot to consider such factors as...
1) Did I load the correct RAID drivers? This isn't always as clear as you might think. Load the wrong driver and quite often, it will work so to speak, but not at capaciity.
2) Are they managing the hard drive system correctly now? There are many factors that will affect the final outcome beyond just the physical drives and drivers for same. I purchased a copy of Diskeeper 9.0 Pro and got a full 300 more 3VDMark05 points for the effort. It also defrags much faster. Now, people complain about it actively watching everything in the background slowing things down, but that mode is for the first 24 hours of heavy use of your PC after the program has been installed or for multiple server management. You want to disable that feature for long term use in most cases after giving it a short term ability to see how you generally run your PC.
3) They didn't go from Ultra to a SATA drive or to a faster, more capable overall build while they were at it. This will make the results less impressive.
4) Their particular applications don't hit the hard drive much after loading, so the results again are less than impressive and this is the case most of the time. Few programs or applications use continued referrence to the hard drive simply because as fast as you can make a hard drive, it is dirt slow compared to system RAM.
5) They don't use the computer as a commercial server. they confuse using it as a server for one game with commercial applications and while they do have things in common, it is a matter of degree affecting total performance change over the older technology.
6) System RAM size feeds back on how well your new drive configuration will perform. Hey, wait a minute! I thought you said access time on hard drives was comparatively dirt slow when compared with system RAM?! Yes, but remember, your system as a whole and the system RAM is going to be busy running cousin Billy's programming as well as security programming and whatever other bloat you have running. this is yet another reason why having the magic Gig of RAM or better, all on two sticks is so vital these days.
So, what will a combination of correctly installed and managed 0 RAID and faster drives do for the average user?
1) It will decrease the time from pressing the on buttion for the PC to Cousin Billy's Welcome screen by 2 seconds, yeppers, just like 2 seconds or so! While it will load Cousin Billy's programming faster, it goes through this stage in the bios which is an extra step where it is dealing with setting up the RAID to begin with and that adds time back on. If you are judging by this measure, you will cry in your Cherrios every time!
2) It dramatically reduces format time of the 0 RAID drive and anything loaded the 0 RAID array as far as programs go. Got from a single 2 MB cached 7,200 Ultra drive to a 0 RAID array of 36 GB 10,000 rpm Raptors and you can easily expect to take 1/3 less time loading programs or formatting the drive when compared to how much space you get in the end. Remember, with 0 RAID, not 1 RAID, you get more hard drive space in the end, so take that into consideration as well. With a 1 RAID of two 36 GB Raptors, you end up with 36 or so GB of usable space. with a 0 RAID of two 36 BG Raptors, you end up with like 70 Gigs of usable space.
3) Reduces the loading time of games. Most find this a compelling reason to buy, but in the end, are dissapointed due to the fact that their games weren't all that big to begin with. In general, and this again varies from game to game depending on how it gets loaded, if the game is less than 1 Gig in size fully loaded, you've wasted the capacity of the new hard drive system. Fo bigger games like my combined install of Forgotten Battles/Ace Expansion Pack/Pacific Fighters all loaded up to the 4.04 Patch loads in about 8 seconds. This compares to 32 seconds with the older, single drive.
4) At this point, things start becoming more conditional and obscure. One of about a billion causes of stutter is hard drive performance. Have a game where online play of downloadable skins is enabled and you will have the custom skins show up faster on your PC by having the faster drives. Also, anything that requires even a single look at the hard drive while playing more demanding games will cause a corresponding, sigle bump in stutter, so this is a varialble not just with how demanding a particular game or program is, but how you use it as well.
OK so Luckyboy 1 and BFG10K- So I get these stutters Luckyboy 1 is talking about in BF2 and BFV and HL2 are the most noticeable. It is at its worst in the very begining of starting the game or the new map and smooths out in the first few minutes but is very annoying in those few minutes. Loading my games on the 74GB Raptor has helped this a little I believe (or percieve?) See my sig for system details, and I have a fresh OS install with all the bloatware disabled- So are these stutters the game "looking" at my HD or is it still in the process of loading stuff up? I can see my HD LED light up when I get the stutter so I know the HD is being accessed. Does everyone experience this or am I the "one in a billion"?
foodfightr
Golden Member
This is a joke right? :disgust:
First off, let me say that I'm not a raid 0 hater. My previous drive setup was two seagate 120GB 7200.7 drives in a raid 0 configuration. Now, I'm using the raptor 150GB.
The raptor is the raptor for two reasons:
If you focus entirely on transfer rate, even with two very poor drives, raid 0 will be faster than a single drive. So why doesn't everyone have two drives then? For a minute, lets assume that data integrity is not important to you and focus directly on the benefit of raid 0. Transfer rate is almost never important unless you are loading very large files, such as a game map or windows.
How often do you reboot? If you're like most of us, very seldomly. If you shut down your computer at night you'll save a few seconds of waiting in the morning. Great, but not good enough of a reason for me.
The ability to load large files quickly. So you might use your computer for work and you're working on a billboard sized image, or your editing a huge database, for example a phone book in a large city. Great, buy raid 0.
But wait! We forgot about loading game maps quickly! If you're playing multiplayer and you load the map faster than every other person, does it let you run around and frag them while they are loading? Multiplayer games require all of the clients to sync in order for game play to take place. Does everyone you play games with have raid 0? Do you play single player often? Great, buy raid 0.
Otherwise, we could take a look at the highest performing hitachi drive I could find on storagereview and compare its performance to a raptor. Turns out the raptor completely dominates in every performance category. What about using less power and producing less heat? Yea, it wins there too.
Text
Thats not even counting the fact that you double your chances of losing all your data. Make sure you buy a third drive to back up your important data!
First off, let me say that I'm not a raid 0 hater. My previous drive setup was two seagate 120GB 7200.7 drives in a raid 0 configuration. Now, I'm using the raptor 150GB.
The raptor is the raptor for two reasons:
- LOW SEEK TIME
- FEATURE RICH
If you focus entirely on transfer rate, even with two very poor drives, raid 0 will be faster than a single drive. So why doesn't everyone have two drives then? For a minute, lets assume that data integrity is not important to you and focus directly on the benefit of raid 0. Transfer rate is almost never important unless you are loading very large files, such as a game map or windows.
How often do you reboot? If you're like most of us, very seldomly. If you shut down your computer at night you'll save a few seconds of waiting in the morning. Great, but not good enough of a reason for me.
The ability to load large files quickly. So you might use your computer for work and you're working on a billboard sized image, or your editing a huge database, for example a phone book in a large city. Great, buy raid 0.
But wait! We forgot about loading game maps quickly! If you're playing multiplayer and you load the map faster than every other person, does it let you run around and frag them while they are loading? Multiplayer games require all of the clients to sync in order for game play to take place. Does everyone you play games with have raid 0? Do you play single player often? Great, buy raid 0.
Otherwise, we could take a look at the highest performing hitachi drive I could find on storagereview and compare its performance to a raptor. Turns out the raptor completely dominates in every performance category. What about using less power and producing less heat? Yea, it wins there too.
Text
Thats not even counting the fact that you double your chances of losing all your data. Make sure you buy a third drive to back up your important data!
Well I agree with your whole post except you are wrong about the multiplayer sync thing. I've only seen 1 or 2 BF2 servers do this. I am usually the first or 2nd person on the map and can drive into the middle of the map and cap a flag before the other team can reach me. (But I'm not currently using RAID.)
It's not a joke. With several apps running on my system today, it took me 27 seconds to load Photoshop CS2. That's too long for me, given the price of the drive. I want a fast, responsive system. I defraged the drive (using Windows defrag) this past weekend, so I don't think it's a fragmentation problem.
Did you look at the link I posted at the beginning of this thread? What he timed are the types of activities I do regularly, and his comparison is pretty telling.
I appreciate the low seek time of the Raptor 150. But what are the other features you speak of?
And maybe there's something wrong with my setup if I'm not happy with the performance of this drive? I was thinking of cloning the drive for safety and then installing the Nvidia IDE SW driver even though the gurus on DFI-Street.com recommend installing this driver only if I'm using RAID. Then I can tell if the drivers speed anything up. They will also give me access to the Raptor's settings, which include NCQ. StorageReview.com says NCQ slows performance for single-user systems with the Raptor 150, and WD told me the drives ship with NCQ turned off, so no need for that setting. Anything else you can think of?
And BTW, thanks to every single poster on this thread. I've read all responses at least twice and really appreciate them. This is a great place. 🙂
Did you look at the link I posted at the beginning of this thread? What he timed are the types of activities I do regularly, and his comparison is pretty telling.
I appreciate the low seek time of the Raptor 150. But what are the other features you speak of?
And maybe there's something wrong with my setup if I'm not happy with the performance of this drive? I was thinking of cloning the drive for safety and then installing the Nvidia IDE SW driver even though the gurus on DFI-Street.com recommend installing this driver only if I'm using RAID. Then I can tell if the drivers speed anything up. They will also give me access to the Raptor's settings, which include NCQ. StorageReview.com says NCQ slows performance for single-user systems with the Raptor 150, and WD told me the drives ship with NCQ turned off, so no need for that setting. Anything else you can think of?
And BTW, thanks to every single poster on this thread. I've read all responses at least twice and really appreciate them. This is a great place. 🙂
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