Upgrading from 74GB Raptor

J

jnick

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I currently have a 74GB Raptor and it has served me well! However, I just cannot deal with the 74GB limit anymore. I'm a gamer, and recently games are taking upwards of 10GBs. Compared to other prgrams, I find myself having on average 4GB left. Therefore, I'm forced to uninstall games that I would still play for newer ones, etc.

I could simply go for a Raptor 150GB however there's the SSD stir, of course. While the 150GB raptor sits at $160, is it foolish to buy that instead of an SSD? I could put that $160 dollars to an SSD, but at the same time, cannot fathom spending over $400 on an Intel X25E.

What upgrade options do I have that does not sacrifice performance?

Thank you!
 
If you have extra sata ports, just keep your OS on your 74GB raptor and install games to a 1tb or 1.5 tb secondary hard-drive. You'll never notice a difference in performance on a game like you will on an OS. It'll save you money and give you a huge storage advantage over a 150GB raptor.

otherwise go SSD.
 
For the best of both worlds, but an Intel 40GB SSD for the OS and general apps, and buy a 1TB drive for games and storage. Most game won't really benefit in any significant way from being on a SSD. You'll get decreased load times, but it's not a day/night difference.

If you can't afford both, then keep the Raptor and just get a large secondary drive and make two partitions, one for games and another for document and media storage. Both WD and Samsung make very good performing 1TB and up drives. Aside from the access times, they'll match or out perform the Raptor you have now.
 
Many games really don't benefit all that much from an SSD, whether it's because the GPU/CPU will bottleneck level loading as much as the HD, or because the difference just isn't a big deal unless you're really really impatient... However I do think it's foolish to sink any money into another VRaptor right now when the newest high-capacity drives come so close to them in performance, and SSD make such a huuuuge difference to the responsiveness of the OS and your apps when you're multi-tasking (over any mechanical HDD).

I'd get a medium-sized SSD (80GB X25-M or 120GB Vertex for $250-$320) for your OS and most played games, and I'd put the rest of them on the VRaptor you already own or a new HDD (you can get a 640GB WD Black for like $60). You won't look back. You can get smaller drives for the OS/apps as well if you don't want to invest that much into the SSD ($120 for a 40G X25-V). I'd also look into using dynamic links to shift your game directories around from the HDD to the SSD or vice versa as the need arises w/o having to re-install them or screwing up the existing installs...

Makes it very painless to move installed games around to take advantage of the SSD when it matters. I can provide a few links if you're not familiar w/the concept... However if you just don't do a whole lot w/your PC besides gaming, then just get a new high-capacity drive and sell the VRaptor while you can still make some money off it, you probably won't notice the difference.
 
Wow...there's a wealth of information right there...looks like I have a lot more options then I thought. I'm leaning towards a 40GB SSD and a 640, maybe? Seems to be the best price/performance.

I have NEVER heard of dynamic links. I'd love to hear more on this!

Thanks!
 
Newegg and ZZF are often running specials on the 640GB WD Black (it uses two 320GB platters), a newer 1TB drive may be a better bang for the buck depending on current pricing (altho I think most of 'em use smaller platters, 4x250GB etc). I'm pretty happy w/my 640 AALS and both my SSD (the AAKS is the Blue version of the WD 640GB drive, not much of a difference in performance if you find it cheap, just a shorter warranty, same for all their drives).

Here's some links I found useful when I started using symbolic links, the Maximum PC guide is kinda crude (in explaining the difference between the types of links and the functionality of the commands) but it's real easy to understand and paints the general concept quite well, there's a lot of good posts about it on the boards too:

Use Symbolic File Links to Master Vista's Files System - Maximum PC
Using Symlinks in Windows Vista - How-To
Symbolic Links at MSDN

There's also a program called Link Shell Extension that basically gives you a GUI to create the symbolic links rather than having to use the console (I haven't tried it tho I've been meaning to, mostly I just used this for my Steam folder so I could split specific games out of it):

How to install your system to SSD and seamlessly move apps to HDD to save space - by InvisiBill
 
could do raid 0 with 2 samsung f3's 500gb or 1tb

I'm thinking of doing the 2x 500gb F3s...

my raptor is way outdated, 74 gig 8mb cache
 
WhatTheSchmidt said:
could do raid 0 with 2 samsung f3's 500gb or 1tb

I'm thinking of doing the 2x 500gb F3s...

my raptor is way outdated, 74 gig 8mb cache
Click to expand...

What about just doing a WD Black 640? Running 2 - 500s or 2 - 1TBs is a lot of data to lose should something happen to that array.
 
Everyone is correct, if you can afford it go SSD if not just get a secondary drive for the games. The only benefit games see from an SSD is load times.
 
I was in the same situation as you, I had a 74GB WD Raptor, but I moved my OS and MAIN applications on 2x64GB Kingston V Series SSD's. They are *cheap* drives, and in RAID 0 performance I'm very happy with them.

My overall computing experience has been improved, that my machine feels like something else. You won't get this kind of experience from changing a Q6600 to i7 965 that's for sure!

From my research, only game load times will improve *a bit* from fast HD's, but not actual FPS. So I just use a 150GB WD Raptor for my bigger games, and other applications I don't run as often.

I'm happy and I haven't regretted it!
 
There should be a new generation of Raptors coming out pretty soon. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1483696 They'll be faster than the current VR's due to the increased density. Depending on their price, they may or may not be a decent deal. However, they now seem to be a very middle of the road niche product. They're faster than regular HDD's, but also cost a lot more. They're cheaper than SSD's, but their access times are still a lot slower. If you're going to drop extra money for performance, it seems silly not to go SSD. If you're trying to save money, a regular HDD is much cheaper and the newer ones are pretty close in performance to the current VR.

Whereas a regular HDD might have a 10ms access time, a VR is about 5ms. A regular HDD is twice as slow as a VR. However, the decent SSD's have access times of 0.1ms. A VR is 50x as slow as SSD. The 2.5" size (increased density) and 10k RPM help reduce the VR's access times, but it's still a physical hard drive with latency due to the physical parts having to move around. SSD access times and small random write performance still blow it away. In Anand's testing, a fully degraded SSD (before TRIM was around) was still 8x faster than the VR.

As I said in the new VR thread, the current 300GB is $200. If the new 600GB is $300, that's about the cost of the X25-M 80GB plus a WD Black 640GB. I'm willing to bet almost every single person would notice more improvement from having their OS and main apps on the SSD and everything else (even all games) on the 640GB, than they would from having everything on the 600GB VR.

With my guide (thanks for the link, Impulse), you can even mount the HDD as a directory under C:, so it all appears to be one big drive in Explorer (just like a single VR would be) and it's quite easy to move apps back and forth between SSD and HDD as you use them more frequently or less often.
 
InvisiBill said:
There should be a new generation of Raptors coming out pretty soon. http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1483696 They'll be faster than the current VR's due to the increased density. Depending on their price, they may or may not be a decent deal. However, they now seem to be a very middle of the road niche product. They're faster than regular HDD's, but also cost a lot more. They're cheaper than SSD's, but their access times are still a lot slower. If you're going to drop extra money for performance, it seems silly not to go SSD. If you're trying to save money, a regular HDD is much cheaper and the newer ones are pretty close in performance to the current VR.

Whereas a regular HDD might have a 10ms access time, a VR is about 5ms. A regular HDD is twice as slow as a VR. However, the decent SSD's have access times of 0.1ms. A VR is 50x as slow as SSD. The 2.5" size (increased density) and 10k RPM help reduce the VR's access times, but it's still a physical hard drive with latency due to the physical parts having to move around. SSD access times and small random write performance still blow it away. In Anand's testing, a fully degraded SSD (before TRIM was around) was still 8x faster than the VR.

As I said in the new VR thread, the current 300GB is $200. If the new 600GB is $300, that's about the cost of the X25-M 80GB plus a WD Black 640GB. I'm willing to bet almost every single person would notice more improvement from having their OS and main apps on the SSD and everything else (even all games) on the 640GB, than they would from having everything on the 600GB VR.

With my guide (thanks for the link, Impulse), you can even mount the HDD as a directory under C:, so it all appears to be one big drive in Explorer (just like a single VR would be) and it's quite easy to move apps back and forth between SSD and HDD as you use them more frequently or less often.
Click to expand...

Good post!

Quick correction on the numbers :D

Average 7200 rpm drive is around 11-13ms.

A VR raptor is around 7ms. Older raptors were around the 8ms mark.

The only platter bases drives to hit 5ms are 15k scsi and sas drives.

This does not include short stroking the drives!

And now with SSDs as the new performance king, I don't see much interested in new raptor because even if its the worlds fastest hard drive it will still be slower than a SSD.
 
I have a 40gb kingston SSD + 500gb Samsung F3 and couldn't be any happier for the price
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
Good post!

Quick correction on the numbers :D

Average 7200 rpm drive is around 11-13ms.

A VR raptor is around 7ms. Older raptors were around the 8ms mark.

The only platter bases drives to hit 5ms are 15k scsi and sas drives.

This does not include short stroking the drives!

And now with SSDs as the new performance king, I don't see much interested in new raptor because even if its the worlds fastest hard drive it will still be slower than a SSD.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think the other guy forgot to include rotational latency, which typically adds 3-5ms methinks.
 
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