10k or 7200?

J

jarhead

Gawd
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Aug 17, 2002
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im sure this question has been asked a million times, but having looked back a few pages, i didnt find it....

looking to set up a raid 0 array (yes, i know it doesnt add much, but doesnt take any performance away either, and it's neat :-D) and naturally my first response is 73gb raptors.

however, after reading on here about them not being all that fast compared to the 200gb 16mb maxtors, im wondering if it's going to be worth the extra $$

thoughts?
 
WD740GD remains the fastest ATA drive money can buy. If you can wedge Windows and all of your programs into the ~140GB you get from two Raptors, then that's what you should buy. Otherwise, check out the 16MB buffer drives from WD and Maxtor.
 
xonik said:
DL, why no love for the Hitachis? The 7K400 generally performs better than the WD2500KS, despite being "only" an 8 MB affair.

http://www.storagereview.com/articles//200507/20050705WD2500KS_1.html
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Have you seen the abyssmal performance of 7K400 on TestBed4? Methinks there is something wrong with SR's sample, as it has been the worst performing ATA drive in the 2006 samples.

I love Hitachi drives too, but until I find an explanation on why Hitachi's drives do so poorly on TB4, I'll have trouble recommending them. SR's TB4 results with 7K400 are so bad, they would be dismissed by a statistician as outliers.
 
Wouldn't you also, then, have trouble making any judgments based on this new testing platform?

</Devil's Advocate> ;)
 
There could be a mechanical defect with the drive or some other abnormality that affects specifically the 7K400. I've been hammering Eugene to give a crack to T7K250 and 7K500, perhaps I should also remind Hitachi that they are idly watching their products take a beating.
 
Well, 140gb would probably be fine, considering what's eating up my two WD120's right now is mostly porn and other DivX movies :-D I basically want those two drives because I A - now have an onboard Raid controller (even though I imagine it will eat up CPU cycles...) and will be damned if i dont use it, and B - am out of space on my other drives. Damn internet.

However, it's not like price is completely ruled out. I'm willing to spend more to get more, but from what im seeing in the reviews you linked, the 73gb raptor is faster, but not wildly so. Considering I will be using them chielfy for games, not really so much data storage, would the raptors be worth it?
 
You wont see much gaming performance difference between a 74GB raptor and a fast 7200 rpm drive like one of the WD 2500KS 16MB drives. Once the game is loaded into the RAM the hard drive isn't usually doing much in-game. A 74GB raptor will shave off like 2-3 seconds probably in load times but you'll sacrifice alot of storage space. RAID0 wont provide you with hardly any benefit at all though and just makes the cost twice as much. But like i said, the hard drive doesn't have alot to do with gaming performance.
 
burningrave101 said:
You wont see much gaming performance difference between a 74GB raptor and a fast 7200 rpm drive like one of the WD 2500KS 16MB drives. Once the game is loaded into the RAM the hard drive isn't usually doing much in-game. A 74GB raptor will shave off like 2-3 seconds probably in load times but you'll sacrifice alot of storage space. RAID0 wont provide you with hardly any benefit at all though and just makes the cost twice as much. But like i said, the hard drive doesn't have alot to do with gaming performance.
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I apologize if this is going off topic or hi-jacking the thread...

But, I was curious about the same thing in regards to 10k vs 7200 (16MB) for game performance. The actual game would be WoW (World of Warcraft). I was hoping to improve the processing of large places like IF and AV with a fast hard drive.

My understanding was that WoW had huge game packets (models, textures etc..) and a fast HDD would improve the loading the packets. So, would there be a difference between the Raptor vs a WD or Maxtor 7200 (16MB) HDD for increased performance?

Besides WoW, I also work with Photoshop, Premiere, Pinnacle Studio, Flash, Maya...for school and for hobby. When it comes to the applications, I'm assuming I have to weigh the speed vs capacity. I would choose capacity, if I'm only shaving 2-3 seconds off load times. I'm sure 2-3 secs is unaccpetable to some.
 
RAM could make a big difference int hat as well.. In EQ2, the more RAM you had, the faster the zone load times went. However, BF2 is more dependant on Drive system. On a recent informal survey, those with faster drives spend less time verifying at the end of a map load. I have dual Raptors in a RAID 0 array and 2GB RAM, and I am consistently the first person in after a map load; usually by a good amount of time.

Present day programming has worked miracles when it comes to accessing data from a harddrive; even to teh point of making a RAID 0 array mostly pointless. But there are still instances where you can still benefit from it.

Vox, looking at your application list, I'd reccomend looking into a RAID 5 array, or possibly a RAID 10. Just judging by that list, it seems like you spend a lot of time on some very big projects. I'd reccomend 7200rpm drives. 10K drives really only improve search times; you're still limited by the SATA buss when it comes to moving that data to and from the drive. And large projects are usually more dependant on sustainable data rates, rather than search times. So a good high cache 7200rpm drive array would probably be more of a benefit than 10K drives (if I'm reading your situation correctly). I'd look into a 4 drive array with redundancy. In a RAID 0 environment, each drive increases your chances of total data loss, since only one failed drive = death to all.
 
vox87 said:
I apologize if this is going off topic or hi-jacking the thread...

But, I was curious about the same thing in regards to 10k vs 7200 (16MB) for game performance. The actual game would be WoW (World of Warcraft). I was hoping to improve the processing of large places like IF and AV with a fast hard drive.

My understanding was that WoW had huge game packets (models, textures etc..) and a fast HDD would improve the loading the packets. So, would there be a difference between the Raptor vs a WD or Maxtor 7200 (16MB) HDD for increased performance?

Besides WoW, I also work with Photoshop, Premiere, Pinnacle Studio, Flash, Maya...for school and for hobby. When it comes to the applications, I'm assuming I have to weigh the speed vs capacity. I would choose capacity, if I'm only shaving 2-3 seconds off load times. I'm sure 2-3 secs is unaccpetable to some.
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WoW's game data is stored in eight MPQ files. The smallest is ~60MB, the largest right at 1GB. These files are enormous, and the reads from them are pretty linear. This means that RAID-0 scales well in WoW, much better than in most games with tens to hundreds of data files. It also works extremely well for content creation applications, where raw linear throughput is king when saving and loading files. A RAID-0 setup of two 250GB drives, with a separate fast disk for your operating system, will deliver outstanding performance at work and play for the appliations you outline above.

Also, these applications benefit enormously from density, once again because of the linear reads. Grab the biggest drives you can afford, preferably ones with at least 100GB platters, as they will give you the highest transfer rates.
 
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