Replacing a raptor

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Fading Phoenix

Gawd
Joined
Sep 14, 2006
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I think I'm going to try and sell my 150gb raptor and buy a new hdd to install windows 7 on (I know it says 7 in my sig; it was either write it there early or forget and never do it).

I've been tantalizing myself with the idea of getting an ssd, but I'm trying to talk myself out of it since the money I could save from not getting one could go to a gpu upgrade.

On the hard drive side I'm looking at the 320gb WD Blue and the 640gb Black but I can't really find any comparisons between the two. Would there be a noticeable performance difference?

I'm also considering just getting two cheap 320gb and running them in raid 0, but I've never set up a raid before. Is it more complicated than I would think, or is it fairly straightforward when installing a new os? I remember xp would ask you to press f6 if you wanted to install a driver for raid controller when you were installing it, but i don't remember anything like that for vista.

Several different questions I guess, it was my little knowledge of raid that brought me here in the end to post. I think I'm subconsiously feeding my desire for and ssd somewhat though, cause I'm sure there are going to be responses just telling me to do that.
 
RAID0 is not complicated to setup. It's really not all the useful either as benchmarks were the only place that it seemed to be a noticeable difference. I ended up breaking my 2x 74GB Raptor RAID0 config and putting Windows with applications on one and games on the other.

IIRC, Vista will allow you to install the RAID drivers off of a USB stick.
 
It wouldn't effect boot times very much compared to just running the single HDD?

I really don't care too much about load times between levels in fps games, but I play a heavily heavily modded Oblivion as well which with it's open world gameplay loads a lot of data from the HDD as you're playing. Running raid wouldn't give me a noticeable difference in an application like that?
 
A video card upgrade is pretty easy, reinstalling an OS and all apps/games/data can take more effort. I'd still go SSD and get a new video card down the road when you can afford it.

Plan B is that I'd keep the Raptor and get the video card. Do the SSD when you you can afford it.
 
Well I've already decided to ditch the SSD (it took some willpower but I can't justify spending the money on one right now).

I'm really just planning a simple upgrade, I'm not even going to get a gpu till the end of this year or sometime in the beginning of next. I'm also already going to be reinstalling my OS anyway so that's not an issue.

From what I've been able to find the original raptors are falling behind modern drives in performance. If I can get a cheap drive that offers similar performance with less noise and more space I'm going to consider it a win.

Which is why I have decided on the WD Caviar Blue 320 that I mentioned in my original post, so I'm definitely getting at least one. I'm just curious if any difference would be noticeable with raid since they aren't very expensive drives. I'm curious about any change in boot time and if it would benefit my oblivion at all, which has a 24gb data folder. My other games don't draw enough from the harddrive during play to make it of any curiousity to me.

I'm not asking only if there will be a huge difference, I'm just curious what kind of a difference I can expect so I can consider it and decide if it's worth an extra $50 for me. It probably won't be realistically, as those are the only two things I would think it would really benefit in a very noticeable way. There's still always the joy of getting to experiment with something new though.
 
RAID0 didn't speed up the boot time for me at all. It actually added a few extra seconds because of the extra time required for the BIOS to detect and set everything up during a cold boot.

I never noticed a speed difference during gaming or general usage. If there was an improvement it was so minute that it would be impossible to tell without a stopwatch.
 
Fading Phoenix said:
Which is why I have decided on the WD Caviar Blue 320 that I mentioned in my original post, so I'm definitely getting at least one. I'm just curious if any difference would be noticeable with raid since they aren't very expensive drives. I'm curious about any change in boot time and if it would benefit my oblivion at all, which has a 24gb data folder. My other games don't draw enough from the harddrive during play to make it of any curiousity to me.
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Depends really. Some cases it does provide a somewhat noticeable load time decrease. Other times, as Bankie pointed, it really doesn't.

With that said, the WD 320GB Blue is a bad choice for the money. For just $5 more, you can get the faster Seagate 7200.12 500GB drive.
 
Danny, that looks like a nice drive that I didn't notice, do you have anything to follow up on that with showing it's much faster?

Anything I've been able to find actually shows the seagate being slower than the WD in most tests except for Read.
 
Well, I ordered a samsung spinpoint f3 rather than the western digital. I'll be honest, it's my first non western digital drive which is one reason I was leaning toward getting the 320gb drive I was looking at.
 
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