Are Raptor buyers happy campers

I had a pair of 74GB raptors, and while they are fast, I got rid of them. I did not like the size contraints. I ran 2x74GB Raptors in Raid0, and it was crazy fast. Problem is, with a 15GB windows partition and the rest for games and music, I filled them. The other thing that quicky dampered my spirits was not being able to move the RAID. SImply put, if you get a new motherboard with a different raid controller, 99% chance its not gunna copy over, never has for me anyways. I though about a PCI card, but with PCIs max bandwith being 133MB/s, that would gain me nothing. Running as two seperate drives just annoyed me, again because of the size. I had the same 15GB windows partition, a 2nd partition for the remaining space, and the 3rd drive was left unpartitioned. I rahter quickly filled both again, and having some games one drive and some on annother annyed me, as I forgot what was where. I sold them and moved to what I have now, a 160GB SATA drive (20GB OS, rest is storage) and a 250GB sata drive (games) and I don't see space being an issue anymore. The loss in speed is hard to notice, and certianly not a bother. If/When larger raptors come out, I may reevaulate a purcase. I have been thinking of getting rid of my 160GB for a 36GB Raptor and having that just for my OS and music, but I doubt I will. I will have to pay money to loose over 100GB of space, just to make windows load 2 seconds faster, bah. So, while the raptors are great, (if you didnt get them already, didnt read whole thread), you need to seriosuly evauluate if you can work with the space limitations. And I woudlnt RAID0 them either. Its one thing to move a drive and format an OS partition to get a clean install, but you will have to break and recreate the array if you switch boards, which means you loose EVERYTHING.
 
Viper87227 said:
I had a pair of 74GB raptors, and while they are fast, I got rid of them. I did not like the size contraints. I ran 2x74GB Raptors in Raid0, and it was crazy fast. Problem is, with a 15GB windows partition and the rest for games and music, I filled them. The other thing that quicky dampered my spirits was not being able to move the RAID. SImply put, if you get a new motherboard with a different raid controller, 99% chance its not gunna copy over, never has for me anyways. I though about a PCI card, but with PCIs max bandwith being 133MB/s, that would gain me nothing. Running as two seperate drives just annoyed me, again because of the size. I had the same 15GB windows partition, a 2nd partition for the remaining space, and the 3rd drive was left unpartitioned. I rahter quickly filled both again, and having some games one drive and some on annother annyed me, as I forgot what was where. I sold them and moved to what I have now, a 160GB SATA drive (20GB OS, rest is storage) and a 250GB sata drive (games) and I don't see space being an issue anymore. The loss in speed is hard to notice, and certianly not a bother. If/When larger raptors come out, I may reevaulate a purcase. I have been thinking of getting rid of my 160GB for a 36GB Raptor and having that just for my OS and music, but I doubt I will. I will have to pay money to loose over 100GB of space, just to make windows load 2 seconds faster, bah. So, while the raptors are great, (if you didnt get them already, didnt read whole thread), you need to seriosuly evauluate if you can work with the space limitations. And I woudlnt RAID0 them either. Its one thing to move a drive and format an OS partition to get a clean install, but you will have to break and recreate the array if you switch boards, which means you loose EVERYTHING.
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Not really sure why you would ever use raptors as storage drives, but your second setup makes a lot more sense. I use a single 36gb as a windows and programs drive with 4 storage HD's so that a reformat takes maybe an hour and all my files remain safely stored :D

Now I just need a way to back all of that stuff up...the 400gb SATA seagate is looking like a good choice...
 
I use a 74 GB raptor as a boot drive, data disk and image CDROMS, actualy very little changes even on the data disk.

Then I have a 300GB drive for bulk storage. I don't know that the RAID helps a single user non-server much. With a server managing a lot of requests from many users all at the same time I can see RAID.

In that RAID does not work with Norton Ghost, my prefered backup method, I can't recomend RAID for stand alone PC's.
 
ehZn said:
Not really sure why you would ever use raptors as storage drives, but your second setup makes a lot more sense. I use a single 36gb as a windows and programs drive with 4 storage HD's so that a reformat takes maybe an hour and all my files remain safely stored :D

Now I just need a way to back all of that stuff up...the 400gb SATA seagate is looking like a good choice...
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Thats what I am doing. I did some playing around with batch files, and found a wonderful thing. "xcopy d:\*.* e:\dbackup /y".Obviously, change the drive letters and folders as you wish. Backs up only files that have changed. Put that in notepad and save it as backup.bat or whatever you want to call it. Just run it once while your at work since copying the whole drive will take a while. From there, Assign is a scheduled task to just run at 4AM every day, and it will back up everything you did since the previous night, overrighting the older files. Works great, because it creates a 100% exact up to date copy, as opposed to compressing it in image files or something. BTW, IMO the 300GB Maxtor woudl be better. the 16MB cache might come in handy for large file transfers, and im sure that would hold everything you need.
 
That's an interesting command. Is there any way to do that without the command? I wish when you copied things you could say "No to all" like you can say "Yes to all" when it asks you whether you want to overwrite existing files. Now will this command work to replace updated versions of the same file?

Actually the 300gb would fall a little short of being able to back up everything, which is a little under 500 gb of stuff. Basically I have had a couple of the drives for 2 years or more and don't have any of it backed up anywhere, so I'm paranoid about losing a lifetime's worth of data if one of them fails. Too bad 50gb blu-ray dvd's are still quite a ways off and will probably cost an arm and a leg.
 
I got the disks installed in my computer 2 weeks ago (1 Raptor 36 Gb for OS/Apps and 120 Gb Caviar SE for storage, which is enough for me along with a DVD-RW DL burner to store the excess stuff out). I'm very satisfied with them and if i will make another computer, I will get the exact same setup, probably with a 74 Gb Raptor or any newer one.

I don't think RAID will serve any purpose in desktops unless you use mirroring for data backup.
 
ehZn said:
That's an interesting command. Is there any way to do that without the command? I wish when you copied things you could say "No to all" like you can say "Yes to all" when it asks you whether you want to overwrite existing files. Now will this command work to replace updated versions of the same file?

Actually the 300gb would fall a little short of being able to back up everything, which is a little under 500 gb of stuff. Basically I have had a couple of the drives for 2 years or more and don't have any of it backed up anywhere, so I'm paranoid about losing a lifetime's worth of data if one of them fails. Too bad 50gb blu-ray dvd's are still quite a ways off and will probably cost an arm and a leg.
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Yes, it will overwrite with newer files also. An easy way to check it is make two text files in a directory. Use the command to copy everything fro that directory to another backup directory. Check the dates on the two text files. Then, in your original folder, edit one and make a 3rd. If you did the command right, it should replace the 2nd text file with the newer, edited one, and copy over the 3rd file that doesnt exist in your backup, but not copy the 1st text file that went upchanged. Go back and check the dates of the three text files in your backup folder, the first should be a few minutes old, where as the 2nd two shoudl have the same dates and be newer.

As far as doing it without the command, I dont think there is a way, but thats becaise I havnt looked, this works fine for me. All my new and changed files copy over every night while I sleep, so I never have to worry about something not being on hand. The most you coudl ever loose is 24hours worth of work, assumine your drive crashes at midnight, you loose all that day, and everything else is perfectly preserved.
 
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