Disk questions

[Craig234]

For a gaming system, I'm thinking of a Raptor 150GB.

I'd like to minimize noise. How much of an issue is it with this drive vs. WD Caviar or Seagate (twice the storage for half the price)?

Is the performance boost worth it (World of Warcraft type gaming)?

What are some good cases to reduce noise (the only one I've seen advertise for noise is the Antec Sonata series. Unfortunately I got the old original w/380W before Sonata II was out).

What is a good partioning of a drive for performance: should I plan for a second physical drive (7200RPM) to split the OS and games? And/or partition them apart on the drive?

I'm surprised there's not a hard drive forum here.

 

[krotchy]

Raptors are a bit overrated in performance boost. In gaming you might notice a 1 second increase in load times. Some people notice this, most cannot. Also keep in mind its really only going to improve load times when your getting info off the hard drive. In something like WOW, I think your Ethernet is slowing down load times more than your hard drive.

Id get a Seagate 7200.10 320 GB if I were you. The 5 year warranty is excellent, and I cant hear either of mine in my case. My 74 GB raptor on the other hand I only hear during bootup.

 

[Rommel44]

Use Seagate 320GB 7200.10 - its almost as fast as raptor and cheaper. Performance will be almost same.

 

[krotchy]

Hmm, I just ran HD-Tach and both my Seagate 7200.10's beat my WD740GD RAptor across the board. Wasnt quite expecting that, but I suppose it makes sense, higher density > higher speed in some cases.

 

[trevelynzx]

~~ oops, this was an empty post...~~

 

[trevelynzx]

hey bro - i have the WD Raptor 150 as my main drive. personally, my next purchase will be an IDE drive simply because of ALL THE TROUBLE i have when installing XP on the raptor because of the lack of a built-in SATA controller (when reformatting). it is really such a pain. anyway, i guess if you had a built-in SATA controller, you'd be fine, but this IS A LOUD DRIVE. i'm about 3/4 of a year into using mine and have had no problems (other than installing the drive as the master). i agree with these guys though -- all around, the performance improvement you'll see is probably not worth the $$ unless you're always rebooting or opening lots of large programs. even still, you'd be fine with the 320gb Seagate 7200, and you'd have over double the storage space at about 80% of the price. your choice.

 

[Craig234]

Thanks for the responses.

Sounds like I'll stick with the 7200 RPM 320GB drives. (It's actually not 80% of the price but 50%, with the Raptor on sale for $200 and the 320GB for ~$100).

Between the Seagate and WD Caviar, why did everyone say Seagate and not WD?

 

[krotchy]

Originally posted by: Craig234
Thanks for the responses.

Sounds like I'll stick with the 7200 RPM 320GB drives. (It's actually not 80% of the price but 50%, with the Raptor on sale for $200 and the 320GB for ~$100).

Between the Seagate and WD Caviar, why did everyone say Seagate and not WD?

5 year warranty

 

[Craig234]

Any comments on the other questions?

What are some good cases to reduce noise (the only one I've seen advertise for noise is the Antec Sonata series. Unfortunately I got the old original w/380W before Sonata II was out).

What is a good partioning of a drive for performance: should I plan for a second physical drive (7200RPM) to split the OS and games? And/or partition them apart on the drive?