Downgrade from 74 GB Raptor to 80 GB ATA 133 Maxtor - WOW!

[faster]

I have a number of high end and low end machines. The machine I have been using for work is an Athlon 64 3500+ on a nforce3 chipset. I have an nvidia 6800 vid card and 2 GB of Crucial Ballistix dual channel. It also had a RAID 0,1 storage array with 4 80 GB Maxtors and 2 single 74gb raptors. The OS was on one raptor, the windows pagefile was on the other.

Well, I am building a new core 2 dup system and was going to take the two raptors of my work machine and replace them with a RAID 1, onborad with two of the Maxtors. I am only at the point where I have ghosted my OS from the raptor onto a single 80gb maxtor and I am ruinning that way now.

I simply cannot believe how much slower the exact same system feels from simply going from a SATA 1 Raptor 10,000 RPM drive to a ATA 133 7200 RPM drive. All things being equal and only the drives difference, it is like a whole different, slower, system.

DUDES! get a raptor! When I upgrade, it never seems to be fast enough. When I downgrade, it really makes me appreciate what I had. I also have an x6800 machine with dual 150 raptors in RAID 0. When that thing writes files, my desk rumbles, but it is the fastest thing I own.

I know I rambled in this post, but heed my words - only a raptor and nothing else makes a substantial performance increase in daily tasks. It makes the computer feel and respond like a much higher end mahcine!

 

[BoboKatt]

Biggest difference I ever saw in my many past upgrades was going from an older 40 GIG drive I had been hanging on for ever to a new 250G SATA drive. It simply floored me. Then I got a Raptor 36 G (the older version) and I was very happy. I am still debating if I would ever see any improvement from that going to say a new 150GB raptor.

The funny thing is that I have 2x 500GB SATA drives for storage and both of the STOMP the raptor 36 in all by benches. I just simply have not moved my OS over to those and still use the 36. Hum... maybe I should finally make the switch LOL.

 

[Steve]

Bear in mind you went backward in terms of drive technology by some generations. How old were those 80GB drives? I bet newer ATA drives would be faster than those.

 

[Steve]

By the way why is this in the motherboards forum?

 

[craftech]

Originally posted by: sm8000
By the way why is this in the motherboards forum?

Probably because for all the tweaks to the bios, etc the biggest bottleneck is still the hard drive. They haven't kept up with the faster technology of the other components. Tom's hardware did an article on that a year or so ago.

It's quite relevant to discussions of any component.

John

 

[rudder]

I've got a 10K rpm, ultra 320 scsi I am about to install this weekend. My core2duo system can get dog slow and I knows its my crappy SATA drive cause I hear it chugging along constantly.

 

[faster]

So, now I have my systems set up:

My main business server / part time gamer:

Core 2 Duo E6300
Intel DG965WH Motherboard
2 GB (2 x 1) DDR2 667MHz PC2-5300 Aeneon Memory
2 x 74 GB Raptor 10K SATA150 in RAID 1
Creative Audigy 2 Sound
OCX 520W Power
16 X CD Burner and a 52 X CD Rom
Floppy
2 X 19" LCD's in dual view
Imicro cordless Keyboard & Mouse
Kensington Pro trackball
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB

This puppy is a mean, scrappy little machine. Its not as fast as the following system, but it is a mean performer. It acts as a file server by day to 6 workstations, and crunches World Community Grid numbers by night. Every now and again I play a game of BF2 on it.

This machine crunches Wolrd Community Grid numbers constantly, and I surf the net play games with it about 3 hours a night.

Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800
EVGA Nforce 6 680i
EVGA 8800 GTX
Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2 GB (2 x 1) DDR2 800 Mhz
2 X 150 GB Raptor 10K in Raid 0
Creative x-fi Pro Fatal1ty 64MB
Creative 7.1 speaker system 16X and 18X DVD burners
9 in 1 Media Reader
OCZ 750W SLI Power Supply
21.3" ViewSonic VP2130b 1600 x 1200
Lite on 18X and 16X dual DVD burners
Logitech G11 Keyboard
Kensington Pro trackball

This is what is what is left, after being stripped, of my super performer (at least it was in 2004)

Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
MSI k8n Neo2 Platinum Nforce3 250
Crucial Ballistix 2GB pc3200 (4 x 512) 2-2-2-6
Vanta/Riva 128 AGP Video Card circa 1994 (don't laugh, a downgrade from GF6800)
2 X 80 GB Maxtor ATA 133 in onboard RAID 1 (downgrade from Raptors)
Onboard sound (downgrade from Audigy2)
300W Power Supply from a gateway (downgrade from OCZ 520)

This computer is perfect for what I need it for becuase it has two integrated ethernet connections and I have it hard wired into two completly separate networks as a "master backup server", thus the RAID 1.

Back to my point though, This RAID 1 ATA 133 is substantially slower that RAID 1 RAPTOR 74GB, which in turn is also, slower than the RAPTOR 150 GB RAID 0. When I say faster, you atre thinking, yea, duh, that makes sense. However, I am telling you, owning all of these systems and using them, the performance difference is VERY noticible. My AVG expired and I had to update it. The experience was so much more pleasurable on the faster drive systems.

I also ghosted a drive from a foxconn nforce2 motherboard with an athlon XP 2500 from a 40GB 5400 ATA133 drive to a 80GB 7200 ATA drive. I did it because defragging the 5400 drive was annoying, it took longer than the other systems in my office. The upgrade did basically nothing for it. No noticible real world change.

My point, these raptors really seem to do a lot for system performance and the overall user experience on the computer. The only three downsides I see to using the is 1 - the price, they are expensive although the last two 150 GB raptors I bought came with a $30 rebate each, limit 2. 2 - The noise. These suckers are loud. You can hear the carunchity crunch crunch crung blat, then the work is done. It is fast, but loud. 3 - They are not SATA2. Although that does not seem to matter because thay are just so darn fast compared to what else is out there.

I have never used SAS or ultra 320 in a desktop - what is that experience like?

 

[QuantumPion]

My main computer has a 74gb raptor (the first variety). I recently put together a HTPC, and stuck a nice SATA 2 250 gb hard drive with 16 mb cache. I thought its speed would be comparable, due to the newer interface, cache, and platter size. But this thing definitely feels way slower then my raptor. I guess the spindle speed and access time has a bigger impact then transfer rate for most uses.