Best Hd's For Gaming?

[JKownz]

I'm in store of buying some good Hd's for basically gaming purposes and everyday computer tasks. I'm speed hungry, and I was wondering your personal opinion on what's good out there.

Compatibility::

Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Core 2 Duo E6600
OCZ GameXstream 700W Psu

Not looking for terabytes of space, 250+Gb would be sweet 1-2 Hd's I wouldn't mind as well. Sata of course

[CorpX]

Raptors, hands down. They run at 10000RPM as compared to 7200 for most other drives and come with a 16mb cache.

However, they cost a lot more than your average sata drive :)

[bbz_Ghost]

In this day and age, the Raptors aren't all they used to be. 3 years ago with the introduction of a Raptor it meant something compared to the 7200 rpm drives of that day, and the Raptor promptly ate them for lunch.

That's not the case anymore.

If you head over to Storage Review or most any site that does hard drive benchmarking nowadays, you'll see that the Raptors, even the highly vaunted 150GB models don't necessarily smoke the current lineup of 7200 rpm drives, especially the 7200.10 series hard drives from Seagate.

It all comes down to this:

Go find a 150GB Raptor for $200 or so, shave a few moments off loading a game, big deal, great.

Go find a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 for $150 or so, get nearly 4x the space, get very similar day to day performance that the Raptor provides, etc.

It's been proven in testing that the 7200.10 series are the best 7200 rpm drives on the market today, and they typically nip at the heels of Raptors by a few percentage points.

Most people around here have moved on from the "Raptor fan appreciation" and realized they could get a lot more storage space and very similar performance by getting something in that Seagate 7200.10 series.

It's all determined by what you want. The Raptors will load games faster simply because they're 10K rpm drives, that's a fact and it's not in dispute. The dispute comes in when you start breaking the cost down across the board and realizing "Hey, I could spend less money, get nearly 4x the space or more and get nearly the same level of performance as a Raptor as proven by countless benchmarks online... and it's not really that much faster than this 7200.10 drive..."

The choice is yours...

[g1xx3r]

In this day and age, the Raptors aren't all they used to be. 3 years ago with the introduction of a Raptor it meant something compared to the 7200 rpm drives of that day, and the Raptor promptly ate them for lunch.

That's not the case anymore.

If you head over to Storage Review or most any site that does hard drive benchmarking nowadays, you'll see that the Raptors, even the highly vaunted 150GB models don't necessarily smoke the current lineup of 7200 rpm drives, especially the 7200.10 series hard drives from Seagate.

It all comes down to this:

Go find a 150GB Raptor for $200 or so, shave a few moments off loading a game, big deal, great.

Go find a 500GB Seagate 7200.10 for $150 or so, get nearly 4x the space, get very similar day to day performance that the Raptor provides, etc.

It's been proven in testing that the 7200.10 series are the best 7200 rpm drives on the market today, and they typically nip at the heels of Raptors by a few percentage points.

Most people around here have moved on from the "Raptor fan appreciation" and realized they could get a lot more storage space and very similar performance by getting something in that Seagate 7200.10 series.

It's all determined by what you want. The Raptors will load games faster simply because they're 10K rpm drives, that's a fact and it's not in dispute. The dispute comes in when you start breaking the cost down across the board and realizing "Hey, I could spend less money, get nearly 4x the space or more and get nearly the same level of performance as a Raptor as proven by countless benchmarks online... and it's not really that much faster than this 7200.10 drive..."

The choice is yours...

Very well said..Of course if you will never use more than 150gb or have a secondary drive for storage then Raptors get the nod hands down..Accept no substitute..:D

[p4gs]

Seagate's 7200.10 RPM drives. Hands down.

perpendicular recording > 10000rpm's

[unhappy_mage]

Seagate's 7200.10 RPM drives. Hands down.

perpendicular recording > 10000rpm's

For what? Sure, those are nice drives, but their seek times leave something to be desired. For a cheap, fast user experience, Raptors are pretty convincing. Additionally, if there's any chance that the box will swap, Raptors are the only way to go.

[LOCO LAPTOP]

really huh?

Quote from X-bit labs

Hitachi: the HDS725050KLA360 drive showed good results in IOMeter’s File Server and Web Server patterns, but moderate in the Workstation pattern. The HDS725050KLAT80, on the contrary, didn’t show anything exceptional throughout IOMeter, but took first place in the last Workstation32 pattern.

These drives showed their best in FC-Test at copying small files. Under other types of load, the drives didn’t perform well.

It was in PCMark04 and PCMark05 only that these drives took leading positions.

Maxtor: the drives from this company passed the test program in a dense group and with average results, except for the threaded tests where they had no rivals. Anyway, we want to say goodbye and thanks to the company for its long and fruitful work. There’ll be no more HDDs under this brand.

Seagate: the drives from this company come from two different families: Barracuda 7200.9 and Barracuda 7200.10. And they perform differently, too. The models from the older family have obviously low results whereas the new family with increased data density stands out among the rest. Excellent results were achieved in IOMeter’s Workstation and Workstation32 patterns. They had a good access time in Winbench99 and the highest linear read speed, too. FC-Test showed their superiority at copying medium-sized and, especially, large files.

Western Digital: the two drives from this company were the stars of this review. They have always been in the top of each diagram throughout the entire test program. Their only weak spot is copying large files, but that’s not a great shortcoming considering their victories.

Our tests have also shown that the performance of modern hard drives is affected by the cache buffer algorithms more than by the physical design. This is clearly illustrated by the results of Hitachi’s and Maxtor’s drivers. Neither of them has mega-dense platters, yet they have performed superbly in a number of tests.

Having said our goodbye to Maxtor, we stumble upon one idea… What if the superb physics of Seagate’s drives is combined with the excellent brains of Maxtor’s? The next year may prove to be very exciting in the HDD area!

[tuskenraider]

Fact: The quickest drive made for a desktop is the Raptor. Get one of those for your OS/app drive and another larger Hitachi T7K500 or WD AAKS series drive for storage.

[jkeener71]

All the HomeBoys say Raptor, I have to agree with the Homeboys.

Of Course I got my 160GB Raptor for $160 way back in May 06, and its a very nice HD. If you dont mind spending a little extra go for the Raptor. If on a budget, get a Seagate 7200.10

Good luck!

[drizzt81]

It's been proven in testing that the 7200.10 series are the best 7200 rpm drives on the market today, and they typically nip at the heels of Raptors by a few percentage points.
I hear that quite a bit around here. So I started to have a look around:

The Tech report (http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/seagate-barracuda-es/index.x?pg=1) has a review of the Seagate ES and 7200.10, showing that the difference between the two drives is slight. If you look at their tests the 7200.10 and ES are all over the place. The ES winning the windows boot time test, but coming in third to last in a game loading test. Excluding the Worldbench tests (where all drives are very close), the WD5000YS beats the 7200.10 in 3/3 load time tests
0/5 File creation tests (write)
4/5 File creation tests (read)
3/5 File copy tests
3/5 File copy tests (between partitions)
6/9 iPEAK tests
4/4 IOMeter transaction rate tests
4/4 IOMeter response time tests
0/2 STR tests
0/1 Burst rate test
1/1 random access time test


Now one may say that the tests on TTR are slewed in one direction. However, their tests show that the 7200.10 and ES versions are very close in performance, with the ES edging out in some tests and losing by a bit in others. Looking at SR's performance database (http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/suite_v4.php?typeID=10&testbedID=4&osID=6&raidconfigID=1&numDrives=1&devID_0=325&devID_1=316&devID_2=323&devCnt=3) we can see that the ES version performs rather poorly in single user tests. Anandtech's game loading benchmarks (http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2803&p=10) has the WD500YS beating the 750GB 7200.10 in 5/6 tests, while the WD3200KS (note: not AAKS) wins only 2/6 against the equivalently sized Seagate disk.

Long story short: I think it is rather bold to proclaim that the Seagate 7200.10 is proven to be ``the best 72000rpm drive''. For some tasks it may be the fastest, but it appears that this statement does not apply across the board.

Of course, we could now start to argue about whether benchmarks do represent the real-world hdd performance... I'd love to hear a proposal on how we ought to compare HDDs instead and possibly a link to a place that does this with the WD5000YS, the T7k500 and the Seagate 7200.10, since that should be a rather interesting match. If that does not exist, how was the excellence of the 7200.10 discovered? I am certain that it is a popular drive, but I don't think that such a metric is representative for a drives `goodness'. After all the IBM `deathstar' series of drives were immensely popular too, and I don't think many people would claim those drives to be the `best' given their reliability issues.

[MC FLMJIG]

I have to say Raptor hands down... I have the seagates mentioned and the rap wins hands down.

It's nice to see benchies but nothing like seeing the game load up super fast...

[LOCO LAPTOP]

Oh I agree, Im the fastest loader in company of heros with a raptor x.

[oneshort]

I love my Raptors, I would not trade them.

[Cousin Patty]

My friend bought a raptor along with his new rig (which is the same as mine) and he wasnt impressed with the performance. I've got one of the new 7200rpm seagates and compared to his raptor, its not worth the extra cash IMO. I still load games hella fast and am always one of the first few people in a game when the server changes maps.

[tuskenraider]

My friend bought a raptor along with his new rig (which is the same as mine) and he wasnt impressed with the performance. I've got one of the new 7200rpm seagates and compared to his raptor, its not worth the extra cash IMO. I still load games hella fast and am always one of the first few people in a game when the server changes maps.
You cannot fairly compare two drives in two separate systems, whether they're the same specs or not. And if you've never compared both in your own rig, how can you claim what it's worth? Maybe with a Raptor it'd be "hella fasterer".

[bbz_Ghost]

Well, the only game I play is still Quake 3 (except for me getting back into StarCraft to get my chops up for StarCraft 2). When I'm in gaming mode, Quake 3 runs entirely off a 768MB RAMdisk I set up just for that purpose. Talk about fast...

If you REALLY want the best performance, get a shitload of RAM and run your game from a RAMdisk. :p Raptors... pffhhttt... I load Q3 levels in under 1-2 seconds, sometimes under 1 actually, and I am always the first on a map, more often than not by several seconds ahead of the next competitor.

With RAM so cheap these days - Fry's is selling 2GB sticks (that's 1 stick, 2GB in size) as well as 2x1GB kits for $70 out the door, take your pick - there's simply no reason NOT to stock up on RAM and max out whatever hardware you have before some chip plant in some small country blows up or an earthquake or tsunami wipes it out and prices skyrocket once more.

Well, there is one reason: no money to pay for it, but but but...

RAM, man... get it while it's cheap. :)

[prozac26]

Raptors, hands down. They run at 10000RPM as compared to 7200 for most other drives and come with a 16mb cache.

However, they cost a lot more than your average sata drive :)
I would agree Raptors are best, but unless you're willing to dig into your pocket, a good 7200 HDD like Seagate 7200.10 is great also.

[Cele-CT]

I have my raptor as my main drive for my common games and I have my externals and internal Sata drives for storage.

THe raptor (while being loud) is the best drive I have used.