Originally posted by: Malak
Never buy the 36GB, for 2 reasons:
It's not faster than anything except maybe 5400 drives.
It's only 36GB!
Just because it's a raptor doesn't make it good. That one sucks.
Hmmm ....
This credible review says otherwise.
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Raptors' seek & write times are smokin' fast by any measure, and only 15K-rpm SCSI drives can beat them in that department (AFAIK). And not by much. And if you use two in a RAID 0 config, you can really utilize the serial interface's extra bandwidth. Then you're talking a noticeable bump in speed.
As for storage, 36GB is actually plenty for a lot of people. According to Western Digital, you can store approximately 10,000 high-res digital photos on that HD, so .... Now if you have a ton of games, or do lots of video editing or storing of pron :roll:, I guess you'd need more.
Keep in mind that one of the huge attributes of Raptors that made them so appealing when they came out was the fact they were the only consumer-level HDs that had 8MB caches. (They're actually enterprise class drives intended for servers, but whatever.) Now, a few years later, there are lots of HDs that have 8MB caches (and you'd be foolish to buy one that doesn't). Plus, their 5-year warranty was also unmatched at the time; now Seagate is offering that too.
Fry's had 'em on sale a week or two ago for like $60ish or something, but the sale is off now. I don't know how you could get a
faster HD for that money, but I don't see them at that price very often. And I don't know about prices up there in the Great White North.
Will you notice a
huge difference over 7200-rpm drives? Prolly not, so it depends on your priorities. Keep in mind that benchmarks can be anywhere from laughable to spot-on -- it depends who does 'em and how they do 'em. So take 'em with a grain of salt and supplement them with comments from users and the product's actual specs. The Raptors' seek & write times
are what they are, and no amount of "benchmarking" is gonna make them 'slower.'
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Read that review if you have time. I thought it was well done and more professional than most 'independent' reviews I've seen.
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