Raptor vs. Maxtor

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topslop1

Senior member
May 8, 2004
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I had thought in my head that the Raptor harddrive was just about one of the fastest SATA harddrives out there. I was planning on picking one up for a Christmas present to myself rather soon.

Now a friend just built a computer with a new Maxtor 250 gigabyte 16mb cache SATA drive. He's telling me that he's used a computer with 2 raptor harddrives in RAID 0 and he says that this single Maxtor drive is just as fast if not faster. He claims to have installed Windows in under 20 minutes with it.

Now I'm left with a few questions set to myself.

Which drive is faster with just one single drive? By how much?
Obviously there's a very large storage size difference with the Raptor being only 76 and this drive being 250. Does the Maxtor come in any smaller sizes at a lower cost?


Thanks.
 
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gate1975mlm

Senior member
Oct 30, 2004
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Originally posted by: topslop1
I had thought in my head that the Raptor harddrive was just about one of the fastest SATA harddrives out there. I was planning on picking one up for a Christmas present to myself rather soon.

Now a friend just built a computer with a new Maxtor 250 gigabyte 16mb cache SATA drive. He's telling me that he's used a computer with 2 raptor harddrives in RAID 0 and he says that this single Maxtor drive is just as fast if not faster. He claims to have installed Windows in under 20 minutes with it.

Now I'm left with a few questions set to myself.

Which drive is faster with just one single drive? By how much?
Obviously there's a very large storage size difference with the Raptor being only 76 and this drive being 250. Does the Maxtor come in any smaller sizes at a lower cost?


Thanks.
Click to expand...

The Maxtor is faster! At least thats what this review says! http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2094

 
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gate1975mlm

Senior member
Oct 30, 2004
238
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Final Words
With the MaXLine III, Maxtor has given users a good in-between point for those who want the capacity of a 7200RPM drive, but with the performance of Western Digital's 10,000RPM Raptor.

Weighing in at 250 or 300GB, a single MaXLine III drive should be more than enough for any desktop user and finally, such a large capacity can be had without a performance tradeoff.

The MaXLine III performs just as well as any of the fastest desktop hard drives available today, but when used with an NCQ-enabling controller, the performance potential is improved tremendously. Although we could only show it in one of our three multitasking tests, NCQ can have some pretty serious performance implications for those users who are running a lot of applications simultaneously.

The benefits to drive-based command reordering are easy to see on paper, but the fact that we were able to reproduce those benefits in a real world benchmark speaks volumes for the technology. As usage patterns become increasingly multithreaded/multitasking oriented, the performance impact of NCQ will improve even further.

Kudos to Maxtor for including support for NCQ in their latest drive; if and when more manufacturers follow suit, it may be time to start reconsidering Intel's latest chipset platform. While Intel's latest chipsets don't offer any tangible performance benefits to current users, the NCQ support alone may be able to convince some to upgrade.

Intel chose wisely when partnering with Maxtor; the MaXLine III should have been a much larger part of their launch in order to soften the blow of an otherwise lackluster performing chipset.
 
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iamskew

Senior member
Aug 17, 2004
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That doesn't say that it's faster than the Raptor, and the Raptor they compared it to was probably the 36gig raptor 1, not the newer raptor 2. On that note, I don't personally think that slight speed advantage of the raptor (10% claimed above) (I also own the 74 gig Raptor, and it's screaming fast) trumps the 180gig advantage of the maxtor. Though I've had back luck with maxtor in the past, I'd take the space over the speed.
 
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jvarszegi

Senior member
Aug 9, 2004
721
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I find this thread pretty interesting, as I'm currently planning my first build. I was planning on using a Raptor II for my system drive, on an nForce4 motherboard. My system has to be a combo gaming/video editing machine and workstation (gaming for me). Does nForce4 support NCQ (I think it does) and do you think I'd be okay buying just two drives for the system, one of these MaXLine III for the system drive and a comparable-size or bigger SATA drive for the data drive? I think I need two big drives for the video editing, and if I can just make a separate system partition on the first drive and be okay on performance, I'd like to do that. I'm so tired of thinking about this problem, I will probably take your recommendations on this and call it a day. Money is not an extreme issue, as I'm planning on spending around $3500 max on the entire system, not counting the monitor. However, I'm not one to spend money on something I don't need.

Edit: Sorry, forgot to ask: how much of an impact do you think the 16MB cache of the MaXLine III would have on working with large files?
 
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gate1975mlm

Senior member
Oct 30, 2004
238
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Originally posted by: jvarszegi
I find this thread pretty interesting, as I'm currently planning my first build. I was planning on using a Raptor II for my system drive, on an nForce4 motherboard. My system has to be a combo gaming/video editing machine and workstation (gaming for me). Does nForce4 support NCQ (I think it does) and do you think I'd be okay buying just two drives for the system, one of these MaXLine III for the system drive and a comparable-size or bigger SATA drive for the data drive? I think I need two big drives for the video editing, and if I can just make a separate system partition on the first drive and be okay on performance, I'd like to do that. I'm so tired of thinking about this problem, I will probably take your recommendations on this and call it a day. Money is not an extreme issue, as I'm planning on spending around $3500 max on the entire system, not counting the monitor. However, I'm not one to spend money on something I don't need.
Click to expand...


YES! NCQ is also on Nforce4 board.
 
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gobucks

Golden Member
Oct 22, 2004
1,166
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I'd say if you absolutely have to have the best, and price is no problem, then go with the raptor, since the DM10s just can't quite keep up. However, if you're just looking for a big boost over a typical 7200RPM drive, and don't want to pay a huge premium and sacrifice drive space, the DM10 is fantastic. I'm personally gonna be putting in the 250GB or 300GB drive when I get my new NF4 PC, depending on pricing at the time. The way I look at it is, I was thinking about putting in a raptor and a slow 7200RPM drive, giving me fast OS loading and what not, but slow loading in everything else. I'd rather take sightly slower but consistently pretty fast loading on all of my hard disk space, so that all my games and programs will load fast, too. Plus, a 300GB drive is cheaper than a 74GB raptor and pretty much ANY 7200RPM drive, while likely having more space. I say the DM10 is a better value, and you'll still be able to brag to your non-raptor owning friends, but if you're looking for speed, not value, than the raptor is the way to go.
 
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Rhin0

Senior member
Nov 15, 2004
967
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0
The 16mb buffer isn't really much of a gain (if any) performance wise as long as the drives are comparable spec wise and are both the same RPM. I'd suggest just getting just a Seagate or Hitachi 7,200 RPM in the 200 or 250 gig range and call it good. There is no point in using Raid 0, it is a "cool" thing to do now with no benefit in gaming which is what most of us do.

You'll never notice the difference and why limited yourself to the Raptors 74 gigs?
 
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