Anyone gone from a 36GB Raptor to a 74GB one?

[aug1516]

Great drive and card combo. I have the same Fujitsu hard drive and it flies! The SCSI combo would be a faster setup, the only downside would be the HD space you lose, increase in heat, and noise.

[EnderW]

Originally posted by aug1516
Great drive and card combo. I have the same Fujitsu hard drive and it flies! The SCSI combo would be a faster setup, the only downside would be the HD space you lose, increase in heat, and noise. HD space isn't an issue, as I have a 250GB WD for storage :D

Heat and noise, I'm a little more concerned about. I've seen some of those HD coolers that fit into your 5.25 bays, are those any good? And I don't want something obnoxiously loud, but they only reason I'd have my computer on while I'm sleeping is if I'm downloading a lot of stuff, and in that case, I don't think my boot drive would be doing much.

How are your boot times?

[aug1516]

Don't worry about the noise. Even though the drive is rated a higher DB then other 15k scsi drives I actually found it to be quieter then the seagate 15k3. drive. Technically the 15k.3 is quieter when measured in decibels but the sound it puts out was much more audible to me then the low frequency sound of the Fujitsu drive. I have not had an issue with heat but the way my PC is setup it's all out in the open for now without any real enclosure. The HD is currently cooled with the passive heatpipe HD cooler by Zalman because I wanted some cooling but didn't want to add any fans. Those drive coolers that fit in your 5 1/4 are junk IMO. The tiny fans don't move enough air and are louder then anything else in your system. You are better off modding your case and rigging up some way to get the drive in back of a larger 80mm or 92mm fan. My boot times suck but that's because I have to load a SCSI bios. After that XP starts to load but it still has this hang where it looks like it's loading but you can tell it's not reading the drive. This happened with my friends SATA system to though so it's not a SCSI thing. Bootup time is somewhat unimportant to me as long as windows is fast....and it is.

[Ice Czar]

well that is a 64bit card but its backwards compatible to a 32bit bus, your mobo doesnt have a 64bit PCI slot, but as mentioned before a single drive wouldnt sature that anyway (hell Id dont think any app you could possibly run even with a 6 drive RAID 0 array could :p, even coming close to saturating a 64bit \66MHz bus would really take multi-user environment)

However it would be possible to saturate a 32bit 33MHz bus with a multi drive RAID array, something you might adopt if you found your swapfile was a bottleneck (animation rendering for example)

Thats why the SCSI drive would be my personal choice (for future expandability) And as an individual drive it will beat the Raptor as well do primarilly to its higher rotational speed. (the Raptors are on par with SCSI 10k drives)

If its truely for performance Id still select the 15k or the 36GB Raptor (which would more than likely suffice) the additional performance of the 74GB Raptor wouldnt in my opinion justify the additional cost, and since as you mentioned you already have 250GB of storage, the need for 74GB of performance storage is probably overkill.

I highly recommend you read these
Reference Guide Hard Disk Drives (http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_index.html)
As the Disk Spins (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=699246)
(you should probably read the 2nd first and use the first as a reference to lookup anything that might be assumed you already know, the 2nd is a much more "modern" and exhaustive analysis of performance factors (as far as the series goes) while the second is a complete, but dated work)

[EnderW]

Well I will probably go with the Fujitsu. Do you think I need any extra cooling?