Cheetah or Raptor

S

slugger_2003

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 30, 2007
Messages
365
Hi all. I have heard good stuff about the 150GB raptor drive (part no: WD1500AHFD for anyone who needs it) and thought I would use it for storing my operating system in my new rig (XP pro - 64 bit)
I have two questions:

1) Is there any difference between the cheetah and raptor?

2) I presume it wouldn't make any difference to loading times on the raptor if I also used it as a storage dump for games etc? I thought this as the OS is set a designated space on the H/D and never gets fragmented like games may etc. I think we covered that in a computing course I did 3 years ago so I may be wrong about that...

What do you all think?
 
Hi,

You mentioned the model number of the Raptor, but the model number of the Cheetah would be more important.

But I think that unless you get the Cheetah 15K.5 and a decent SAS host controller, the Raptor will be faster.

Hans-Jürgen
 
Hi, thanks for the reply. The reason I didn't mention the model number of the cheetah is that I don't have any idea what it would be or anything about them.
I was hoping people here would have knowledge on those H/D's?
Assuming I use the same hardware, the only difference being the hard drive itself...which would be better for my needs? Still the raptor?
 
If you main "application" for your PC is gaming the raptor is likely a better value than getting a cheetah.
 
Hi,

If you assume you can use the same hardware, then there's most likely something wrong. The Cheetah series require SCSI/SAS host controllers, either onboard or as add-on card.

For the price of one Cheetah plus host controller you can get 2-3 Raptors. Use the first 30-50GB of one Raptor as system, the first 10-30GB of the second Raptor as partition for temp directory/pagefile, an the rest of the two Raptors as "storage". If you are a heavy Gamer, then maybe the first partition on a third Raptor for your favourite Games.

Keeping the first partition small makes sure you use the fastest part of the harddisk and keeps the seek times low compared to a full-stroke. You just have to make sure that you don't have to access data from the first and second partition of the same harrdisk at the same time during heavy load.

Hans-Jürgen
 
Advantage to the Raptor being that IF you decide you want more performance, SAS is backwards compatible with SATA! (That still doesn't do you a whole lot of good though)

There are only a handful of reasons why you would want SAS, though.
  1. You run some sort of app that has crazy random disk I/O patterns that require lots of throughput.
  2. You wish to install 12+ drives in a single system
  3. You need the reliability of enterprise-class drives.
  4. You want a bigger e-phallus
  5. You have more money than sense.

Raptors are great drives for a power user. Plus, with the SSD and Hybrid drives coming in, I wouldn't sink too much money into a disk subsystem at this time, as you may end up stuck with an expensive old-school drive config.

Even a 73GB Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drive is ~$350
A 150GB Raptor X is $169.99 at BestBuy right this very moment.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top