74Gb 8Mb Raptors - CHEAP

Get Western Digital 640gb Black instead, you won't be sorry.

In addition Fry's often has these drives refurbished for 40+tax (pretty much the same price once you add shipping and tax). What do you want to bet that these used drives are also refurbished.
 
Yeah I mean, thats great but, probably doesnt have a warranty, and also these are kinda outdated now. The velociraptors are significantly faster(I know since I swapped out for one). But still, not a bad price... Im sure all these are going to start falling because they will be competing with SSD's.
 
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
 
not bad, but Retsam is right. They are competing with SSD's, and they are not winning.
 
A buddy of mine just retired 2 enclosures of these for a total of 32. He's already sold 2, and I plan on grabbing a couple as well. $25 a piece if you wanna drive to Ann Arbor, MI. I would be willing to grab some from him and ship them, too :)

Now THAT'S how you jack a thread!
 
Archaea said:
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
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Maybe in sustained data transfers, but not the random data access (reads and writes). What makes a SSD feel fast is the random reads and writes.
 
It's getting to the point where modern 7200rpm drives are surpassing the performance of the older raptors, while people who are focusing on performance have made the jump to SSD.

In that situation a raptor is basically just a small drive that uses a lot of power and puts off a lot of heat. They are fine to use if you already have them, but I wouldn't buy one.
 
GotNoRice said:
It's getting to the point where modern 7200rpm drives are surpassing the performance of the older raptors, while people who are focusing on performance have made the jump to SSD.

In that situation a raptor is basically just a small drive that uses a lot of power and puts off a lot of heat. They are fine to use if you already have them, but I wouldn't buy one.
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+1..
 
GotNoRice said:
It's getting to the point where modern 7200rpm drives are surpassing the performance of the older raptors, while people who are focusing on performance have made the jump to SSD.

In that situation a raptor is basically just a small drive that uses a lot of power and puts off a lot of heat. They are fine to use if you already have them, but I wouldn't buy one.
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Exactly, and a raptor comes nowhere near the overall performance of an SSD.
 
GotNoRice said:
In that situation a raptor is basically just a small drive that uses a lot of power and puts off a lot of heat. They are fine to use if you already have them, but I wouldn't buy one.
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What about like the poster above stated, you have a bunch in a RAID? Ten 74GB Raptors is less storage than a 750GB than you can buy for $60 right now, and that $60 plus electricity to run that drive 24/7 for the next year is less money than running the ten Raptors 24/7 for the next year...

Also statistically greater chance of one of those ten Raptors failing in the next year than your single 750GB drive...
 
Archaea said:
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
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I would get the newer WD models over these in any situation. Those raptors won't come close to a SSD in terms of Access time.
 
At this point I agree with the others, new WD 7.2k drive or SSD.
 
Didn't someone find, over a year ago, that the latest 7200rpm drives outperformed the velociraptors at both access time and throughput when the 7200rpm drive was shortstroked? You can shortstroke the VR's too but if you get that small, you can also shortstroke the larger 7200rpm drives even more to keep the advantage down. Of course, the VR's leave the original raptors in the dust.

I'm all for partitioning a large drive with the OS/swap in the first small partition, applications in a second sized-properly partition, and the third being used for data storage for media and whatnot. Short of small increases in performance with an SSD (I have overkill amounts of RAM in all my systems so my own Intel SSD test wasn't very impressive), there's no reason to go with anything but a 15k rpm SAS, 7200rpm desktop drive, or SSD.
 
SGSeeker said:
Didn't someone find, over a year ago, that the latest 7200rpm drives outperformed the velociraptors at both access time and throughput when the 7200rpm drive was shortstroked? You can shortstroke the VR's too but if you get that small, you can also shortstroke the larger 7200rpm drives even more to keep the advantage down. Of course, the VR's leave the original raptors in the dust.
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The drive in question was a Seagate 1.5TB drive shortstroked to 300GB. The thing is even faster than the WD velociraptor 10K drive.
 
Archaea said:
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
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lol, right. Aside from a small difference in access time (and a whole lot less noise) I couldn't tell a difference between a wd6400aaks and 2x74gb raptors RAID 0. SSD is the only way to go now. With almost equal performance from 7200rpm drives and way faster seek with SSD there's no reason to bother with the raptors.

Did I mention these things are LOUD?
 
Archaea said:
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
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Uh no. As others have said, an array of 3 of these might give you the same sustained read speeds of a newer SSD but won't come anywhere close to "feeling" as fast in general use simply because random access times and random reads/writes will still be much slower. A single SSD is superior to an array of even several of these in every way. Buying raptors at this point is just pissing money away.
 
[H]'er;1035397725 said:
what does shortstroke mean?...how do you do it?
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It's a new way of saying "formatting a small amount of disk space at the front of the drive reserving the center of the platters for the OS partition". Basically what everyone has been doing for years now.
 
WD Raptors were an expensive and loud mistake when I bought them. The referbs I got under warranty are even worse. I will take a brand new, much quieter 7200 rpm drive any day over a used Raptor..
 
There are a lot of contradictions in this thread.

1. SSDs are better for OS because of near 0ms access times
2 Raptors are crappy in RAID 0 because of sustained read write being slow when compared to newer 7,200 RPM drives.

The 8mb raptors (VR or not) still have a ~4.5ms access time as compared to the typical 8.5ms access time for a decent 7200RPM drive.

If statement #1 is true, then a faster access time drive like the raptor is going to be a better OS drive where a lot of sustained data transfer isn't necessary. A raptor in a striped RAID 0 well have decent sustained data transfer abilitiy as well -- thus you get better than average access time and pretty decent sustained as well when compared to the 7200 RPM drives a few here are recommending. Again I think my post is true - a couple of these in RAID 0 would compare favorably overall to a cheap SSD.
 
Archaea said:
a couple of these striped in RAID 0 would probably outperform a cheap SSD in general overall performance and certainly offer more diskspace for the same money.
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No, way. My 2 250GB AAKS drives in Raid 0 blows this thing out of the water. TBH, I didn't notice a difference between one aaks and the 16mb version. My SSD craps all over four aaks drives which are quite fast alone in raid 0. I found a 16mb raptor to be intolerably slow for an OS drive.

I would spend the extra couple of bucks on a 500GB spinpoint F3, it's probably a faster drive front to back and holds more than 5 times the data.

Archaea said:
There are a lot of contradictions in this thread.

1. SSDs are better for OS because of near 0ms access times
2 Raptors are crappy in RAID 0 because of sustained read write being slow when compared to newer 7,200 RPM drives.

The 8mb raptors (VR or not) still have a ~4.5ms access time as compared to the typical 8.5ms access time for a decent 7200RPM drive.

If statement #1 is true, then a faster access time drive like the raptor is going to be a better OS drive where a lot of sustained data transfer isn't necessary. A raptor in a striped RAID 0 well have decent sustained data transfer abilitiy as well -- thus you get better than average access time and pretty decent sustained as well when compared to the 7200 RPM drives a few here are recommending. Again I think my post is true - a couple of these in RAID 0 would compare favorably overall to a cheap SSD.
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I didn't find the 16mb version to have any faster access time. Real world access time is nowhere near 4.5ms, btw. This is very old tech.
 
BababooeyHTJ said:
No, way. My 2 250GB AAKS drives in Raid 0 blows this thing out of the water. TBH, I didn't notice a difference between one aaks and the 16mb version. My SSD craps all over four aaks drives which are quite fast alone in raid 0. I found a 16mb raptor to be intolerably slow for an OS drive.

I would spend the extra couple of bucks on a 500GB spinpoint F3, it's probably a faster drive front to back and holds more than 5 times the data.



I didn't find the 16mb version to have any faster access time. Real world access time is nowhere near 4.5ms, btw. This is very old tech.
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HDTach benchmark testing actually benchmarks them at roughly twice as fast in access time as any 7200 RPM drive I benchmarked them against. Notice I said cheap SSD. Put the price point in perspective. 2 raptors at $70 compared to a small cheap $70 SSD. I'd take the raptors myself.
 
just a reference, I have 2x 640gb wd blacks and i have 2x 150gb raptor x drives.

side by side i get better raid 0 performance out of my raptors...however these were the newest raptors before the original line was left off, so i would guess performance is gonna be different than the original run of raptors
 
I have two 74Gb Raptors. In Raid 0 as an OS drive the difference was unnoticeable versus just one.

My Intel SSD feels far far faster. I'd do like others have said and buy a 640Gb WD before I bought an older raptor.
 
I figured I should throw this out there for any potential buyers - these drives are extremely loud. In my last build the raptor was the loudest component (beating out the ICE cooler on the socket 939 shuttle and a 6800GT).
 
Archaea said:
HDTach benchmark testing actually benchmarks them at roughly twice as fast in access time as any 7200 RPM drive I benchmarked them against. Notice I said cheap SSD. Put the price point in perspective. 2 raptors at $70 compared to a small cheap $70 SSD. I'd take the raptors myself.
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Are they noticeably faster than a decent 7200rpm drive? No, not from what I have seen. Slower, imo. I also never saw the access time and by that I assume that you meant latency being half of my AAKS and I never saw a bench showing that low of latency. Like I said front to back a 500GB F3 is a faster drive with more than five times the storage.

If you are using the drives for just the OS you are much better off with a 30GB Agility or Vertex which have been popping up for as little as $90 quite often.

I can't see buying a used, loud, ancient drive.
 
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One thing these raptors have going for them is that they have been very reliable for me. I have 7 of them running 24/7 for years now and not a single hiccup from any of them.
 
Nice, I need another one of these to go RAID0. I might get one of these $25 ones the thread-jacker speaks of :D
 
You guys are all arguing different things. And to those of you that have never used a raptor, STFU. Access times and Data Transfer rates are very different. For OS drives, many times access times make a drive feel faster as it is seeking a lot to different small files. For transferring files as well as loading large program files, transfer rates are going to make the difference.

My single raptor x (latest 150gb version of the original raptors) will beat the crap out of a 7200rpm drive in access time (even the famed F3s). Period.

There are quite a few 7200rpm drives that will kill the raptors in data transfer rates. Period.

Good SSDs are superior in both Access Time and Transfer Rates. Period.
 
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Archaea said:
HDTach benchmark testing actually benchmarks them at roughly twice as fast in access time as any 7200 RPM drive I benchmarked them against.
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Shortstroking the 7200rpm drives will effectively place the drive just above the raptor's access time range. Across the entire drive, yes the raptors have a faster access time but if the stroke of the heads on the 7200rpm drive are shorter, the access time decreases while the 7200rpm drives retain their huge lead in overall throughput. Shortstroking a drive to have a primary partition 10% the original size of the drive (150GB in the case of 1.5TB drives) just about doubles the drive's IOPS. Now if you did the same with a VR, a 7200rpm couldn't catch up but the available space would be quite useless. Of course, if you have data on another partition that's read (such as media on a large hdd) the access time will skyrocket but if that were a problem, just don't use that space.

There have been a few shortstroking tests about the time SSD's started coming out in quantity and they all found great improvements, even compared to the VR's with a larger 20% primary partition on the 7200rpm drive.

For the price of the VR's, going RAID0 shortstroked 7200rpm drives is a better deal as you nearly double the operations that the VR can do. Many people have found that upgrading from the original raptors to a newer single partition 7200rpm drive (this was years ago) gave them better system responsiveness.
 
SGSeeker, I agree that a large 7200rpm drive is the best for most these days, in price/performance it is totally the way to go. The Raptors and VR are still faster in Access Times though, and that does make a performance difference depending on what you do. Transfer rates do let you down, which is why they are not the best option for most anymore and there are setups that feel much faster with slower access times.

My 150gb raptor will pull 8ms times in HD Tune, short stroked to 60gb it goes to 7ms, and short stroked to 30gb (small SSD territory) it will do 6ms times.

In comparison, 4 500gb F3s will absolutely kill it in transfer rates, but the access times are still higher:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/679657-4-samsung-f3-500gb-raid-0-a.html

No doubt they would feel faster and be faster for a lot, but lets give credit where credit is due in that the raptors strength is and always has been access times which are a big help when seeking lots of small files.
 
Grentz said:
My single raptor x (latest 150gb version of the original raptors) will beat the crap out of a 7200rpm drive in access time (even the famed F3s). Period.
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When the Seagate 1.5's first came out, I replaced a VR 150GB drive with three of the Seagates. 1 primary and two RAID1. The OS partition was setup with 50GB of space on both and while I've got a ton of devices attached to the pc (7 usb devices and one firewire DAC), along with 20-something auto-launch applications including virtual machines running on the primary drive, the 7200rpm drive booted me up in no noticeable differences in speed (it was something like 2 seconds faster on the Seagate). The VR was imaged over to the Seagate to a 50GB primary and 100GB secondary partition with the remaining 1.2GB used for low priority VM's - all hardware and software remained the same, being a Q9500 at 3.8GHz and 8GB of ram running on Windows Vista x64 at the time.

There's a good chance the amount of ram helped a bit though - an Intel 80GB G2 helped applications boot up to 50% faster, depending on the app, but system responsiveness once everything was cached was no different. There was no noticeable improvements in OS load time, or auto-launch application time. VM's always sit on the Seagates though.
 
Grentz said:
SGSeeker, I agree that a large 7200rpm drive is the best for most these days, in price/performance it is totally the way to go. The Raptors and VR are still faster in Access Times though, and that does make a performance difference depending on what you do. Transfer rates do let you down, which is why they are not the best option for most anymore and there are setups that feel much faster with slower access times.

My 150gb raptor will pull 8ms times in HD Tune, short stroked to 60gb it goes to 7ms, and short stroked to 30gb (small SSD territory) it will do 6ms times.

In comparison, 4 500gb F3s will absolutely kill it in transfer rates, but the access times are still higher:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/679657-4-samsung-f3-500gb-raid-0-a.html

No doubt they would feel faster and be faster for a lot, but lets give credit where credit is due in that the raptors strength is and always has been access times which are a big help when seeking lots of small files.
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Database access is the only place I can see the original raptors as being useful today - that or in older pc's. Anything that is seek-only without any decent-sized data transfer will be MUCH slower on the drives offered here. I'm not saying the VR's aren't decent drives but for non-server use, people WILL be let down by their performance if they expect a lot more than a properly setup 7200rpm drive will get them. If I had a need for a 10k's benefits though, I would have some 15k drives installed in the pc. For everything else and my personal needs currently, a SSD (if you can't wait a couple more seconds) with 5400rpm or 7200rpm storage drives are all that are worth the money - not legacy hardware like the original Raptors.

To be fair, you should also add that many times RAID0 will increase access times. This isn't so much a problem today with even Intel's onboard controllers but in the past when RAID0 started becoming popular with enthusiasts, all people were looking at were transfer times and not the 20+ms access times. I've never been a fan of RAID0, even today.
 
Grentz said:
You can see the raptors get beat by the F3 in many tests here as well:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/5

Overall they are clearly not the fastest. The old raptors in particular like my 150gb one get killed by the leaders of todays 7200rpm arena.
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I agree and their random read/write response times are the most beneficial in seeing the drive's capabilities as far as system responsiveness is concerned. Decrease the stroke on both though, the 7200rpm performance improved considerably while the 10k doesn't see as drastic an improvement while losing a lot of usable space.

Anyways, I think we made our points. I still don't believe any raptors are worth their price tag now days though, even the original raptors in this thread. That's not to mention the other benefits of SATA2 either.

Edit:
BTW, I sold the Intel SSD. The performance improvement for the cost just wasn't there for my use and my system. I can't stand unresponsive PC's, ever since going from a 486 DX4-100 to an AMD K6-300 back in the day. That improvement got me off of unresponsive pc's forever but the SSD just didn't help anything. The computer still remains responsive - it just takes slightly longer for the app I'm loading to come up but it isn't noticeable when you multitask.
 
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