Questions about WD raptor

[student101]

Can someone give me an idea of what to expect (in terms of performance) by installing a raptor 10,000rpm hard drive? Does it preform better in a raid setting or can I just run it with my ata 100 drive in standard settings? thanks p4 2.6c asus p4p800deluxe 1gig corsair ddr400 ati 9600pro

 

[WobbleWobble]

You would run the Raptor and your existing drive independently. Performance, I don't know how to answer that. The faster seek times should help your computer feel more snappy, but the STR transfer rates are only slightly better than a regular 7200RPM drive.

 

[DaveSimmons]

There have been a bunch of Raptor threads here recently, if you use the forum search feature you can read them.

There is also a review of the 74 GB version linked on the left side of the main page of www.StorageReview.com

 

[MDE]

Installing programs and loading levels in games will be faster, mainly anything that is HD intensive. I'm using a Raptor as my boot drive and an 80GB ATA133 drive as my storage disk, and it's a very nice setup.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: WobbleWobble
You would run the Raptor and your existing drive independently. Performance, I don't know how to answer that. The faster seek times should help your computer feel more snappy, but the STR transfer rates are only slightly better than a regular 7200RPM drive.

Only slightly better? Yeah... I guess that's true... the STR of my Raptor is "only" 20-25% higher than my WD800JB.

Chances are, if you have a fairly new drive you won't "feel" much difference cause most things people do aren't very hard drive intensive. With 40-50 MB/s STR's on 7200 RPM drives, once the data transfer starts, it doesn't take long to load the whole file into memory, seeing as how most people don't work with files larger than 40-50 MB on a regular basis.

I forget what it was the last time I checked, but I'm fairly sure I can be at the desktop within 30 seconds of powering the computer on... and remember that about 10 seconds of that is taken up by the POST and the SATA controller BIOS initializing and detecting drives.

Windows XP Pro installed from the CD in under 12 minutes if that gives you any more indication of performance.

 

[Schadenfroh]

i went from a 5000ish rpm 2mb cache WD to a 10,000 RPM 8mb cache raptor, night and day differance