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Raptor still the best?

S

spiderhole

Member
I'm putting together my new system (E6600/Asus P5B) and going to use a WD 7200rpm SATA 3.0 drive for my secondary/media drive. I still havent decided on what hd to use for the primary/os/application drive, but my current system uses the 74gb Raptor. Should I pay the extra for a 150gb Raptor considering its only SATA 1.5, or would some of the newer 7200rpm SATA 3.0 drives give me pretty close to the same speed for things like OS, app and game-map load?

Thanks,
M
 
No harddrive is even close to utilizing SATA1.5 Mb/s 🙂

MAYBE sometimes a hdd might get a minute spike of burst read at a higher speed, but that is insiginificant if it has sufficient cache.

A raptor is noticeably faster, but I am not really certain its actually worth it, personally. (but my prioities might differ from yours. I am always short on storage so I aim for max storage and speed be damned...)
 
Originally posted by: spiderhole
I'm putting together my new system (E6600/Asus P5B) and going to use a WD 7200rpm SATA 3.0 drive for my secondary/media drive. I still havent decided on what hd to use for the primary/os/application drive, but my current system uses the 74gb Raptor. Should I pay the extra for a 150gb Raptor considering its only SATA 1.5, or would some of the newer 7200rpm SATA 3.0 drives give me pretty close to the same speed for things like OS, app and game-map load?

Thanks,
M
Click to expand...
You may want to watch my post here I just posted.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=1933307

To answer your question, according to StorageReview and others, the Raptor WD1500 is faster than any other SATA, and faster than SCSI drives in single-user (Desktop) setups. The WD740 (old 8mb buffer) with the 00FLCO firmware is appreciably faster than the previous firmware versions of it. It's also faster than any other SATA drive (except for the WD1500), and like the WD1500 was also faster than SCSI drives in some apps, but not as many as the WD1500.
http://storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html . On the last page or thereabouts, they have the different firmware versions of the WD740.

Note that there are also 2 versions of the WD1500; WD1500AHFD with "TLER" and the much cheaper WD1500ADFD. Contrary to what I've read from users, the cheaper one is the FASTER one according to SR. I can't find the page now at SR that compared the two WD1500's.

Interesting to note that WD came out with a new WD360 with the 16mb buffer.
 
You may be interested in this from my thread:

Guys I happened to find a review comparing the old WD740, the new WD740, and the WD1500 and the new WD740 is faster than the WD1500 in all but one Desktop app and some RAID apps. Pretty amazing, I would have thought the WD1500 would have been faster in everything.
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfis...%2f%2ftweakers.net%2freviews%2f621%2f1
(What is "Windows Boat"? Not too impressive for the Raptors whatever that is).

Note that the site is in another language and that's the Babelfish translation pages so it's REALLY SLOW.
 
As long as you are happy with the comparatively small amount of storage compared with other drives of a similar cost raptors still offer the best performance for SATA desktop use at the moment.

I'm certainly happy with mine.
I went from 1 36 to 2 36 in raid 0. I'm currently using 2 150s in raid 0 and they are very quick.
 
Originally posted by: BFG10K
The 750 GB Seagate is faster than the 74 GB Raptor but just a tad slower than the 150 GB one.
Click to expand...
Where did you see that review? I'd be interested in reading it.
 
Originally posted by: computer
Originally posted by: BFG10K
The 750 GB Seagate is faster than the 74 GB Raptor but just a tad slower than the 150 GB one.
Click to expand...
Where did you see that review? I'd be interested in reading it.
Click to expand...

it probably has a higher str but i doubt the seek times would be lower so, op, you need to realize that although a hdd may have a higher str it may feel slower due to the fact that it has a slower seek time.

you need to quantify faster or quicker - faster would be str, quicker would be seek/latency times
 
IMO the raptor never was the "best" - the much higher cost for the tiny performance boost wasn't worth it to me. Some people have different opinions.
 
Originally posted by: SparkyJJO
IMO the raptor never was the "best" - the much higher cost for the tiny performance boost wasn't worth it to me. Some people have different opinions.
Click to expand...

I felt this way too, but I still have some 15k RPM Cheeta drives working in RAID on an old Mac here. They were like $400 each if I remember.
 
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