Does the Raptor still hold advantage vs modern HDs

[phexac]

I am considering getting a Raptor for my OS drive, but I wonder if it is actually faster than the new 7,200 RPM drives since it is SATA150 interface, while all the other new drives have SATA3.0 interface.

It's quite a bit more expensive for its capacity, so I want to make sure that it actually delivers a significant performance advantage over the regular drives... The performance that matters to me is general every-day opening and usage of common applications (office, brosers, OS, etc.). All my games will be on the secondary regular drive. I am just trying to speed up everyday tasks by using the Raptor as my main OS and common application drive.

 

[n7]

Come vist us in this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2168918&enterthread=y

If you get one of the very new 334 GB platter HDDs from Samsung & WD, they'd do well as an OS drive, though you still can't beat the Raptors for seek time.

Otherwise they aren't a good value.

 

[Rubycon]

Well one thing is for certain. At 10,000 RPM it can wind tape up to 39% faster than a 7,200 rpm disk. 😉

 

[nerp]

It's hard to justify the price but it's easy to justify the performance.

Dual raptors in my Intel rig, swapfile and OS on independent drives, pure goodness.

 

[mwmorph]

Depends if you think it's worth it. It's $ per gb is something like 8-9x current drives but it is still somewhat faster.

As platter densities go up, read speed does go up but not to Raptor levels.

http://www.storagereview.com/p...nchmark/bench_sort.php
Newer drives are about 80% as fast for vastly lower $.

This would be an excellent choice
http://www.storagereview.com/HDS721010KLA330.sr

917 office marks versus 1010 for the best Raptor. You could get a full TB for a comparable price.

Finally, when it comes to World of Warcraft disc access, the Deskstar 7K1000 completes its sweep against the Raptor in our three entertainment titles[Far Cry, Sims 2, World of Warcraft], topping the 10K RPM drive by 4%.

Perhaps partly due to its huge capacity and partly due to Hitachi's tradition of wringing the last bit of performance out of its ATA and SATA drives, the Deskstar 7K1000 displaces WD's Raptor WD1500ADFD as the fastest drive around when it comes to single-user performance.

Multi user performance suffers quite a bit though.

Personally I'd go for the 1TB f space since 150gb nowadays is very little storage. I could go through it in weeks if not days while 1TB is quite a bit of space.

 

[Tweakin]

I wish I could do 2 wd 640aaks in RAID1...that would be sweet.