Raptor Review

[Devine]

So i saw this article on [H] earlier this week and kinda forgot about it, but i remember it today and was wondering what everyone else thought about it. Heres the link. I personally have 2 74gb raptors in RAID 0 and i love them. Its seemed like a pretty good artcile and didnt have any bias towards or against the raptors. Some people say that 2 raptors in RAID arent that fast, or have an equal for a lower price pre gig, but might that have something to do with the RAID controller like it shows in this review. I havent seen a review with different controllers before, but then again i havent looked to hard to find some reviews about controllers. Even though benchmarks are good, they dont represent game play which i would rather see than any sync benchmark. But he/she did test out the hd's in a few games although there arent any definte numbers on how fast the games loaded, they said that

Raptors in RAID 0 setup has provided the best improvement to my MMOG experience of any hardware upgrade I have undertaken over the last couple of years

and that seems pretty big to me since they have probably upgraded their entire comp at least once in that time and when people upgrade, they normally dont think upgrading their hd's is important, just cpu mb and video card and just reuse everything else. Maybe this article will have people considering a hd when they upgrade their comp. Because you can have a fx-55 and two 6800 ultras in SLI, but if you cant get the data to them, well then your screwed

So what does everyone else think, or am i just smoking something and totally wrong

 

[DougLite]

All of the 'benchmarks' they did in that article were synthetic tests, not tests of real world applications. They do perform gamer tests, but do not report tabulated results that can be analyzed - only that one setup is 'faster' than another. They don't even tell which setup produced the quicker results on the game tests - the Dual Caviar setup or the Dual Raptor setup - only that RAID-0 is faster, and that the Raptor in RAID-0 p'wns everything.

This article is extremely suspect in my mind - they report complete results for tests we all know RAID-0 will win anyway, then for the gaming tests they report only their conclusions, not the data that they are based on. Also, there is this disturbing line:

The two different types of hard drives were kindly supplied by Western Digital.

They also don't mention (although anybody who thinks about it knows it) that RAID-0 doubles the cost of the drives.

If the ViaArena review team can document their application performance test run results, include drives from other makers, and identify the software environment they ran their tests in, I will accept the results. Until then, I will dismiss it as a thinly veiled marketing operation by WD. I would hate to think that their review team is for sale, but with all of the inconsistencies I see in that article, it looks like they are.

 

[Devine]

hmm, defintely a different point of view. I didnt even catch the part where they mention where they got the drives. And your right, it would be nice if they had more drives in their review and had actual results other than "its faster" when they used them in games. I went at took a look at their site and they seem like they are legit, defintely not as big as [H] though So hopefully they wouldnt lower themselves to being bought for something as little as a hd review but i have seen worse things, ATI's recent paper launches anyone?