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Raptor Question

The 74gb models are far superior to the 36gb models. RAIDing the 36s won't help them much either.

Check out storage-review or some other sites for comparisons.
 
Also, I have a K8T NEO2-FIR with VIA SATA Raid on the southbridge and a Promise IDE/SATA RAID controller. Which one should I use?
 
1) RAID 0 has been proven time and time again to be useless in desktop computer and gaming access patterns, by reputable people like Storage Review.

2) Raptors, especially the 36gb, are showing their age. Why buy a 74gb Raptor? When you can get a 250 or 300GB drive for the same price that is close enough to the Raptor in speed that you'd never, ever, ever notice a difference.

With games starting to routinely come on a DVD or 5-6 CDs, it just isn't realistic for an enthusiast to limit themselves to a tiny little hard drive because its 1% faster in benchmarks, and not noticeably faster in real life.
 
That's another thing I'm debating, I just don't want to have to format and partition that much space. After all, I'm only using half of my 80GB now. When I get tired of a game I uninstall it anyway. Besides, I have a network server that has plenty of storage for pics and movies and other stuff.
 
NKDietrich said:
1) RAID 0 has been proven time and time again to be useless in desktop computer and gaming access patterns, by reputable people like Storage Review.

2) Raptors, especially the 36gb, are showing their age. Why buy a 74gb Raptor? When you can get a 250 or 300GB drive for the same price that is close enough to the Raptor in speed that you'd never, ever, ever notice a difference.

With games starting to routinely come on a DVD or 5-6 CDs, it just isn't realistic for an enthusiast to limit themselves to a tiny little hard drive because its 1% faster in benchmarks, and not noticeably faster in real life.
Click to expand...
I completely agree. I have a 36GB raptor, and I honestly cannot see the difference in real time performance except when I'm installing things onto the raptor.
 
While I agree that RAID-0 is overrated, the WD740GD remains the fastest ATA drive you can get for less than $200, as WD and Hitachi refuse to bring the monster performance of their respective 400 and 500GB flagship drives to smaller units in the 200-300GB neighborhood. For users with performance as the number one goal, and they are willing to accept the Raptor's limited capacity, it is still an excellent choice, and is by far the most cost effective way to achieve top flight ATA storage performance if you can look past its limited capacity.
 
dbranger94 said:
That's another thing I'm debating, I just don't want to have to format and partition that much space. After all, I'm only using half of my 80GB now. When I get tired of a game I uninstall it anyway. Besides, I have a network server that has plenty of storage for pics and movies and other stuff.
Click to expand...

More space you _might_ use is better than more speed you'll _never_ notice. I mean if you're looking at it from the viewpoint of spending the money wisely, that is.
 
DougLite said:
While I agree that RAID-0 is overrated, the WD740GD remains the fastest ATA drive you can get for less than $200, as WD and Hitachi refuse to bring the monster performance of their respective 400 and 500GB flagship drives to smaller units in the 200-300GB neighborhood. For users with performance as the number one goal, and they are willing to accept the Raptor's limited capacity, it is still an excellent choice, and is by far the most cost effective way to achieve top flight ATA storage performance if you can look past its limited capacity.
Click to expand...

The Raptor is most definitely a fast drive, but that speed is wasted on a typical desktop user or gamer. Not enough long-term sequential transfers, and the advantage it has with its seek time is offset by its very poor areal density. (Being able to seek to a spot twice as fast isn't very good if that spot is twice as far away.)

Obviously it has its advantages but I think a gamer would lose a lot of space, and gain basically nothing.
 
Clicky Note that the WD740GD smokes all comers in that comparison in gaming performance, and also handily defeats the other drives in the field in SR's producticity measures. The WD2500KS manages a tie with WD740GD in the Office DriveMark. Yes there are faster 7200RPM drives (WD4000xx and Hitachi DeskStar 7K500), but both of them cost more than the WD740GD (twice as much in the case of the 7K500.)

I've said it once and I'll say it again until somebody makes me wrong...the WD740GD is the best sub $200 ATA drive on the market.
 
The one problem I have with that chart Doug is that while it shows the speed of the drive, it doesn't really represent the fact that games don't spend a lot of time thrashing the HD (unless you have very low memory) while you play. So, lets say theres a 20% increase in io/sec. If your hard drive is only being accessed 1% of the time, theres not a noticeable real world effect. (Those numbers are of course made up, but you see my train of thought here.)

I'm not a hard drive expert but I know that with RAM as cheap as it is now, games spend less and less time grinding away at the HD. Most of that time is spent during a level "load".
 
You are quite correct. Indeed, many people that come here talking about wanting RAID-0 setups I tell to get 2GB of RAM, step up to a dual core CPU, or get a better video card. All of those things will show much better return on investment for a gamer/power user than a faster hard drive will. Most people I tell to simply get the largest/fastest 7200RPM drive they can afford.

However, users willing to pay to play will find that the Raptor offers excellent performance at its price point. WD has refused to bring the performance of the WD4000xx drives to a 200 or 300GB drive (probably to protect the Raptor's position), and Hitachi seems quite proud of the high margins they are getting on every 7K500 they sell, so they don't bring the performance of it to a smaller drive.
 
Right now I have 2 D740X 40GB in RAID-0, BUT, they have to be on the same cable because of the Promise RAID controller. So I lost quite a bit of speed compared to my previous setup as two masters. Anyway, time to upgrade. I was just going to go with the single 74GB for the speed. I don't care about space that much. I'll prob add those 2 D740X to my other one and put them in my server. So, 120GB on server and another 74 on my gaming rig. By the time I fill that up, I'll be upgrading again anyway.
 
One of the problems when looking at benchmarks that compare Raptor perfromance and 7200 rpm units is the tendancy to use the largest capacity of 7200 model. Unless one is intending to buy a 300GB or larger drive one will not realize similar performance to the benchmark.

While the Raptor is getting long in the tooth, it can still offer some benefit in some environments. Particularly those that involve long transfers. Streaming video and audio come to mind. But some games also process data in largish chunks. Of course, as another poster pointed out, 2GB of RAM will often provide a bigger boost, expecially in gaming environments.

OT: Does anyone have a comment or experience on real world desktop performance differences between NCQ and non-NCQ modes with dual cores? I know that StorageReview and others have shown no significant improvement, but their tests, IIRC, were done on single core desktops. Also, Anand, I think it was, had some tests that seem to indicate that at least one of their benchmarks differed significantly.
 
NKDietrich said:
The one problem I have with that chart Doug is that while it shows the speed of the drive, it doesn't really represent the fact that games don't spend a lot of time thrashing the HD (unless you have very low memory) while you play. So, lets say theres a 20% increase in io/sec. If your hard drive is only being accessed 1% of the time, theres not a noticeable real world effect. (Those numbers are of course made up, but you see my train of thought here.)

I'm not a hard drive expert but I know that with RAM as cheap as it is now, games spend less and less time grinding away at the HD. Most of that time is spent during a level "load".
Click to expand...

Unless you have 2GB of memory World of Warcraft does benefit a fair amount from the Raptor. Especially when you get into Ironforge and other cities where there is alot going on. You can't really group games into one category when comparing things like how much they hit the harddrive.
 
I hadtwo 74gb Raptors in RAID-0 until one drive went bad. The only time I noticed a difference was when loading programs and BF2 maps. My windows XP would load after 2 1/4 passes of the xp bar with RAID-0 raptors and now after a fresh reformat with one raptor my windows bar will do 3 1/2 passes. I sent the broken raptor out for warranty and when I do receive it I probably wont return to RAID-0 because I don't feel like reformatting again. I definitely don't regret getting two because I will use them both in different PC's. I'm a heavy gamer (although not of late) and 74GB is pleanty of space for my games. When I finally do run out of space I will simply remove any old games I don't play because there's no way I will be playing 50-74gigs of games at once. As far as MP3 and porn storage goes, I use my file server to store all the goods.
 
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