Recommend an Affordable FAST Spinner

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

So I am planning on upgrading my stepsons rig for Xmas.

One of the biggest performance issues on it is the storage.

I wanted to get him an SSD, but despite my nagging, he is not disciplined enough to only have the games he is currently playing installed, so an SSD large enough to fit all of his installed games would be PROHIBITIVELY expensive.

Instead I am looking to Z77 style SSD caching.

That being said, I want a fast enough HDD behind the SSD cache so that when there are cache misses (which there will be) it doesn't take as long to recover from them.

I was looking at WD's Velociraptor line, and the latest gen (1TB, 500GB, 250GB) seems by far to be the performance leader in this regard, but the pricing seems a little too high for me.

I came across a great price on Newegg for the previous gen. WD Velociraptor 600GB ($99) which might be a good fit here. It's large enough to fit his games (I don't have to worry about storage, he can access my 7TB NAS) and judging by this review it seems second only to the current gen. Velociraptor as far as gaming performance goes.

So I guess my question is, for my purposes, is this 600GB previous gen Velociraptor drive a good choice, or - seeing that its an older design now - are there more current mainstream 7200rpm spinners that would be a better choice?

Any input appreciated!

 

[HobartTas]

Greetings

All Velociraptors spin at 10000 RPM, I would be very surprised to see any other 7200 RPM drive even come close, at that price I'd grab a couple of them. The closest alternative 7200 RPM drive would be a 1TB WD Black for around the same price, but the extra speed for slightly smaller space is a very good trade off considering the current low price of the raptor, as usually they are about 3x (per GB) the price of 7200 RPM drives.

I don't think a newer 10000 RPM raptor is going to be that much faster than an older model 10000 RPM one, the review you mentioned pretty much confirms that.

You probably won't even need the SSD caching once you have the raptor.

Cheers

 

[Old Hippie]

are there more current mainstream 7200rpm spinners that would be a better choice?

You can't get any better than a VR for strictly a mechanical drive.

You may want to look into those hybrid drives which I know nothing about.

 

[ToddW2]

You will be more than happy with the VR $99 drive.

If you can swing it why not a $160 Crucial M4 256gb for OS and the games that matter the most, and then get 1 or 2 VR and possibly RAID them for the rest ?? Should be a nice system. For the last 6+ years all I used was VR then I went to SSD, and NOOO looking back, but compared to black the VR still "feel" MUCH faster as fast due to the 13ms vs 7ms seek times.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

You will be more than happy with the VR $99 drive.

If you can swing it why not a $160 Crucial M4 256gb for OS and the games that matter the most, and then get 1 or 2 VR and possibly RAID them for the rest ?? Should be a nice system. For the last 6+ years all I used was VR then I went to SSD, and NOOO looking back, but compared to black the VR still "feel" MUCH faster as fast due to the 13ms vs 7ms seek times.

My plan is actually to do a ghetto Smart Response Technology install.

Intel's SRT (chipset based SSD caching) limits you to 64GB for caching. The rest of the SSD can be partitioned and formatted.

If you install windows first on the hard drive, set up SRT to cache the hard drive, then delete the windows partition on the hard drive and disconnect it, installing windows to the remaining space on the SSD, and reconnect the hard drive, you can actually boot windows from the SSD, and still cache the hard drive using the same SSD.

My plan is to do this, have windows installed and boot from a 64GB partition on a 128GB SSD. The other 64GB will be used to cache the VelociRaptor.

Then I plan on moving (and editing the registry to match) Program Files and Users to the cached velociraptor.

Essentially with a $89 128GB Samsung 830 SSD and a $99 Velociraptor I will have boots and windows running from SSD alone, and game files running from the cached velociraptor.

It should also leave a little space on the SSD only partition for me to symlink 1 or 2 of his favorite games to the SSD only partition and speed them up further.

Definitely a bit unusual and not supported by either Microsoft or Intel, but I'm thinking this should be a snappy budget friendly way of getting decent storage speeds for not so much money.