• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Are "Raptors" overrated?

Are Raptors over rated in terms of price to performance in non-server environments?

  • Yes they are.

    Votes: 35 34.3%

  • No, they are well worth it

    Votes: 67 65.7%
  • Total voters
    102
N

{NcsO}ReichstaG

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2004
Messages
1,768
Hey,
Excuse me if this was brought up already.
However, I am just curious, because I am researching HDD because I need more storage space. Are "Raptors" not worth the money? If say, I play games once in a while like CS:S, do video editing (Premiere,) play around with video encoding, and recording videos to my hard drive from my TV tuner (among other things, like running regular applications like: Visual c++, Norton Antivirus and so on) will I see a large enough performace to justify the $175 + price tag? Also, if I have this hard drive, will I see a performance increase in multitasking?
Or should I just get a 200 GB Diamond Max 10, 16 MB buffer for $107?
-Thanks
 
I voted no, but it's not true for you. Allow me to explain. WD740GD, like it or lump it, it is the fastest thing going on SATA. If you can wedge all of the stuff you will be accessing frequently into 70GB, then Raptor is the right choice for that system. BTW, the 36GB (WD360GD) is DEFINITELY overrated - it's even more expensive per GB than the 73GB Raptor, and slower than some 7200RPM drives. It's in the not recommended section of the Buyer's Guide for these very good reasons.

However, you do heavy video work, and will easily wipe out that 70GB, probably within the first week of your video work. For your application you have picked precisely the right drive, the 16MB Maxtor. At least 75% of a Raptor's performance, more capacity per spindle, and a lower cost per GB, all of which are goals of your design. Don't forget that if you get a newer NV or Intel chipset, then you can utilize NCQ which will be another bonus for Maxtor, once again for your application.

The Raptor, like RAID, is not the be all/end all of storage. It does have its place though.
 
Thank you for your informative work. :)
I just have one question about NCQ, which I barely know anything about.
To utilize NCQ, do I need to buy a newer motherboard, you mentioned "a new chipset" ? I can't upgrade the motherboard drivers and then utilize NCQ?
Also, what is "NV"?
 
NV refers to Nvidia. You must not hang out in the vid card forum too much - it's understood over there ;)

No a chipset drive update will not give you NCQ goodness. It is part of the SATA-II feature set, and mus tbe supported from the ground up by both drive and host for it to work. With the Maxtor 16MB SATA drives or certain 7200.7 and all 7200.8 Seagate SATA drives, you are good to go on the drive front. (Hitachi does have an entry here as well, but it's only 80GB) However, your SATA controller must support it as well. For AMD systems, NF4 Ultra and SLI (not NF4 vanilla) support NCQ. On the Intel side, the new nForce for Intel, along with ICH6R on 915 and 925 chipset boards, and the ICH7R for the 945/955 (Not in retail yet, they are the new chipsets for the dual core Intel desktop chips, coming Real Soon Now.) support NCQ. There are also come server level add-in SATA cards that support NCQ, but they are typically very expensive. So no, a driver update will not enable NCQ on an older chipset/controller. Sorry dude. You'll have to pop for a newer mobo with one of the chipsets I've outlined to get NCQ goodness. If you will be running as more than one disk intensive task, such as encoding and decompressing/virus scanning, NCQ and multiple spindles working on your tasks will be a Godsend.
 
The NForce4 chipset supports NCQ. Though, not sure if you know or not, so I apologize if you do, but raptors run TCQ which is a touch different than NCQ.
 
Yea I voted for Raptors by accident, but unless your trying to get the best benchmarks around, it's really not worth it. DiamondMax 10's are so close to it in benches that the choice seems obvious to me
 
On average Raptors are going to have better performance then a drive with NCQ. NCQ only shines when a drive is heavily multi-tasked. A faster spindle speed is across the board increase.
 
defakto said:
The NForce4 chipset supports NCQ. Though, not sure if you know or not, so I apologize if you do, but raptors run TCQ which is a touch different than NCQ.
Click to expand...

"Four SATA drives are supported at current 1.5GB/s speeds plus four PATA (IDE) devices." - http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2248&p=2, Anandtech's NF4 review, on the lowest grade, 'vanilla' NF4. However, I haven't seen too many vanilla NF4 boards in the wild, as Intel typically rules the market segment that it is targeted towards, as the NF4 vanilla has some other key limitations like only 800MHz HTT and no bus speed locks, making it DoA as an enthusiast platform. The vast majority of A64 NF4 boards that are shipping are Ultra or SLI, both of which are good to go on NCQ.

As for Raptor TCQ, that is only going to be supported on certain add-in controllers, and IIRC, a certain BIOS revision of the ICH5R for 865/875. I am not aware of a current chipping system chipset/core logic with support for Raptor TCQ. Also, I don't think a meager two SATA ports on an older platform is going to get it done for Reichstag.

Zardoz said:
A faster spindle speed is across the board increase.
Click to expand...
Head over to SR and compare the WD360GD to Hitachi 7K400 and Maxtor MaxLineIII. Higher spindle speed does not necessarily a fater hard drive make. Obviously, higher spindle speed helps, as it is the only way to reduce rotational latency, but other high performance parts (actuator, buffer) and logic (caching strategy, read-ahead algorithms, buffer segmentation/write caching) need to be present as well to make a fast hard drive.
 
I'm also wondering if a raptor is worth it. I have like 600GB of combined storage already and would like a raptor solely for OS + Games. My fastest drive is my WD SE 250GB SATA drive probably...
 
I like the speed. Now granted I was comparing it to my previous (old) 40Gb 7200rpm with 2Mb cache. And I've noticed a world of difference for HD intensive stuff, especially like a virus/spyware scan..... MUCH faster.

However, if I was doing heavy video editing, I would raid 0 a few 250Gb WD's. Big and fast storage.

I wouldn't worry the Raid 0 security as long as you are backing up your info as you probably burn your stuff to DVD after you've work on your original files. (people over hype the "insecurity" of Raid 0)

Now if you have super important big files that can't be replaced or backed up... don't raid them. Same amount of storage just slower.
 
I believe in having the best of both worlds. A Raptor for your main drive, a DiamondMax10 for a slave. That's exactly what I'm doing for my next upgrade. I already have the Raptor with other slaves.
 
Not overrated

Raptor
OS/Boot ; games and programs drive
+
some generic SATA 160GB for storage

= awesomeness
 
meh, I'm a data hog so I would never get a rapter. I'd rather have a slower 300 gigabyte diamond max 10 that a faster 73 gig rapter. I'm relatively patient too so 10-20 seconds off a load time doesn't matter to me.
 
You keep everything on one drive? That isn't the greatest of ideas, as many people here would tell you.

Personally, I have multitudes of drives for different purposes. My boot drive is always the smallest/fastest one, and the Raptor 74gb is fine for that.
 
i use a raptor in my main rig for a boot drive and all my applications and games...everything else is stored on my file server

if you really want speed....get a couple of 15K scsi drives :D

now thats fast!
 
quakefiend420 said:
i use a raptor in my main rig for a boot drive and all my applications and games...everything else is stored on my file server

if you really want speed....get a couple of 15K scsi drives :D

now thats fast!
Click to expand...

Great, but what do you think of the raptor's performance?
 
agree with DougLite's assessment
would point out that your needs arent "storage space"
in video editing its more like virtual memory and is typically transitional space
a Raptor is ideal for that role, as are SCSI performance drives

voted no
 
If you look at anandtech.com's review of the Seagate NCQ drive, NCQ does not provide performance benefits in single application activities.

What it does show is that platter density also plays an important role in performance, and in the case of game loading times, provides greater benefits than improved spindle speed. You can see the performance gain with the performance of the 400GB Seagate drive compared to the Raptor, it wins hands down by about 8 seconds in Doom III, and more than 1 in HL2 and Command and Conquer Generals.

If you look at the benchmarks, it is clear that for gaming purposes, the Raptor is worse in most aspects than drives with denser platters, even with the 10Krpm spindle speed. So I'd say the Raptor is definitely not worth it, especially considering the low storage and value.
 
And as I posted in the Raptor vs DM10 thread, that review is not consistent with ANY other review I have seen - even Anandtech's past reviews. Tweakers, SR, produce much different results as well. I also pointed to some inconsitencies to the new testbed @ Anandtech that should be addressed IMO.
 
It's worth it if you have the money to burn and have some other drive in mind for storage. Really Raptors are meant for speed for non-server class machines and with regards to that they are definitely not overrated. There is a reason 74GB Raptor drives consistently outperform most non-SCSI drives in benches.
 
DougLite said:
As for Raptor TCQ, that is only going to be supported on certain add-in controllers, and IIRC, a certain BIOS revision of the ICH5R for 865/875. I am not aware of a current chipping system chipset/core logic with support for Raptor TCQ. Also, I don't think a meager two SATA ports on an older platform is going to get it done for Reichstag.
Click to expand...

TCQ is part of the ATA4 spec, as long as the controller supports the entire ata4 spec you should be able to use TCQ on the raptor. There are even PATA drives that have TCQ anabled, i think it was seagate that made them, they didn't call it TCQ though, they called it something else.

*edit*
I've been put in my place *grin*
Seems that TCQ support is few and far between controller wise, which is a shame.
 
Anyone who says a Raptor will not give you much of a performance boost is just pissed that they cannot afford one. ;)

Here is my real-world example I like to give.

In my system, it used to take about a minute and thirty seconds to extract a ~700MB compressed file.
When I got my 36.7GB Raptor, it cut the time down to about 55 seconds. That's a hell of a boost.

I notice almost everything is faster on my computer since I put in the Raptor. My boot times are about the same because of the extra time it takes to load the SATA controller, but that's ok.
I love my Raptor, and now that I purchased a new digital camcorder, I will be getting a 74GB model for editing videos.

I look at it this way. A Rapor is expensive and has limited storage space. But with how cheap a +100GB drive is, it kind of evens out. Most people don't install 74GB of software, and a separate drive for storage is ideal anyway.

/rambling
 
Raptors are still one of the fastest consumer level drives on the market. While it is true they don't always hold the highest raw transfer speeds they have much better seek times. That will make much more noticeable to the user than high transfer rates. Think Joe user who doesn't defrag his harddrive once a week, etc. Lots of random reads the raptor will pull ahead of any other Sata/ide drive out there right now.
 
I guess I didn't analyze the performance reviews carefully enough. It does seem like Anandtech's results are anamolous and are not consistent with other reviews. In that case, the Raptor is likely to be the better choice, but it is hardly a bargain and might or might not be "worth it" to most people.
 
They are well worth it.


If you have Never used a raptor in your box then you should not even speculate or vote here, Period.

Once you have put a Raptor in your box, you wont go back to anything less than 10K RPM and SATA.
 
slamgoku said:
is shitty at best.
Click to expand...
Price / Performance Ratio is Horrible I will give you that. But thats not what Im looking for. I have 4 - 74 GB raptors in my box...

I am not going to use all them seperate. Raid 0... I dont need backup of anything because I back everything up on my Server. Otherwise I might use Raid 1....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top