WD 1TB VelociRaptor vs. SSD?

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UMASS

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I'm going to build a new rig within the next month or two. Newegg has the WD VelociRaptor 1TB HD on sale for $169.99 I was thinking of buying a 240GB SS drive for my OS, then maybe a WD VelociRaptor for my games. Good call or not? Any & all insight would be appreciated!
 
240 SSD and a 2tb 7200 RPM HDD would be the better bang/buck choice IMO.
 
Just how much storage space do you need for your programs? How many do you have to have installed at a time?


The Samsung EVO 240GB SSD's are regularly going for around $150-170. Samsung EVO 500GB SSD's are regularly going for $270.

Your choice of a 240GB SSD + 1GB Raptor will cost you around $340-$350.

If you are the type that feels they need to have their entire Steam library of games installed at the same time, then get the platter hard drive.

If you can afford to manage your installed programs a little bit, then go for a single 500GB SSD. It will save you money, be helluva lot faster and slightly simpler setup.

Alternatively, you can spend $100 more than the 240GB SSD + 1GB Raptor combo and get a 1TB SSD (Crucial M500 960GB or Samsung 1TB EVO). $100 difference is the equivalent of bringing a sack lunch instead of eating cheeseburger combo meals for about 2-3 weeks.
 
UMASS said:
I'm going to build a new rig within the next month or two. Newegg has the WD VelociRaptor 1TB HD on sale for $169.99 I was thinking of buying a 240GB SS drive for my OS, then maybe a WD VelociRaptor for my games. Good call or not? Any & all insight would be appreciated!
Click to expand...

I dont see anything wrong with that. Ive got a 1TB hard drive and have a ton of games on there as well as music, pictures and videos and still have 390GB free. I wouldnt exactly call that a "value" though cause I dont think the Raptor is gonna be $110 faster than a Caviar Blue 1TB drive thats going for $60 shipped right now but if youre not worried about bang for yer buck, I dont see anything wrong with a SSD paired with a Raptor for storage.
 
I'd rather pickup a WD Black 1TB or even 2TB for around that money and less for the 1TB. IME the Veloci is only a few meg per second faster then the Blacks in read operations and write was about the same, tests done on a 6gbs SAS controller with BBU. Put the remaining few bucks into a 6 pack of beer or SSD.
 
All of you guys rock! I mean it. Thanks to all that replied. I've been using 1TB WD Black drives for my last 3 builds. Love the drives. They're pretty quick & the cost is reasonable & so dependable. I usually pay around $80.00 for a 1TB WD Black drives (when they go on sale @ Newegg)

Here's an example of my current computer (which is almost 4 years old now see signature) 1TB WB Black with 683GB left on my HD. I have a TON of games installed, but many of them are older & don't take-up much space. Maybe my best bet is to just jump-in to a 500GB-750GB SS drive outright.

I guess the WD VeloiRaptor isn't worth the extra coin in the end. Money really isn't a big issue, but I like to think I buy things that are solid & have value. I'll follow-up with my purchase.

Many thanks all!
 
Another thing to look at is noise too. Velociraptors are VERY noisy. An ssd is dead silent. If you do need speed from a platter drive though and want to save even more money, the new FZEX Black drives are supposed to be a bit quicker, almost as fast as the Velociraptor. And you could pick up a 3tb for almost the same price.
 
UMASS said:
I guess the WD VeloiRaptor isn't worth the extra coin in the end. Money really isn't a big issue, but I like to think I buy things that are solid & have value. I'll follow-up with my purchase.
Click to expand...


It's a shame and shows how fast the market has moved with SSD's. There was a time when the VelociRaptors were great, the best, but now they just are loud, hot, and eat up energy against better solutions.

The WD Black's will ALWAYS have my respect. Probably the best line and best experiences I've had across the board with hard drives were all Black ones. Before the Asian Tsunami that hurt the HDD industry, the pricing was insane for the performance.
 
The Veloci's are still great none the less as it's still the fastest mechanical drives around and to add on top of that they have good reliability as far as I'm concerned as they are designed to be used in an enterprise environment. But this doesn't become much of a deal in a consumer point of view and use. It's a bit of hyperbole to say they are very noisy, they are not that bad but they run a bit hotter then typical Blue's, Green's and Black's, if you want noisy surround yourself with a few of the old Hitachi OEM IBM and Seagate Cheetah 10/15k enterprise SAS drives.

The other good thing about the Veloci's is that used units go for cheap on ebay (at least from our ebay domain). I purchased a lot of 8 600GB Veloci's last year for a friend for $220. The drives was pulled from workstations in a company specialising in AutoCAD rendering. The RAID 0 performance for 2-4 drives during my DOA test was pretty impressive.
 
My first Raptor was 74Gb. I currently have a 150 and a 300 sitting on the extra-hard-drives shelf. Over the years I've used many of them in high-end workstations and even servers (8 150's RAID5 was pretty bad-ass at the time and the machine is still in service today with only a few drives having been replaced). Once the SSD price per gig became reasonable I don't see why anyone wouldn't go with what most everyone in this thread says - SSD + big data drive.
 
I have a pair of 500GB V-raptors and they are the coolest running drives I own, typically run between 75F in my Lian-li and only 80F in my other case.

My older 2TB FASS runs at 95F, 15F hotter on average.
The AAKS blue I have runs at 87F.

They consume less power then blacks, are not noisy and the sink really shines to keep them cool.
 
I have 3 raptor drives that i use for games with my SSD being the OS. It works fine for me.
 
The sale on Newegg for the Raptor's is over. I decided to jump-in & purchase a Samsung EVO 750GB SS drive. I have a new back-up 1TB WD Black drive that I'll install as well.
 
i used to have a few of the velociraptors, they were fantastic back in the day, went from those to ssd and didn't notice regular hdds getting quicker in the interim, sometimes i still see a copy operation between my mechanical storage disks hitting 100MB/s and im like "oh yeah, they can do that now" (before i went to the velociraptor you were looking at mid 50s to about 69 max on standard 7200rpm disks, which maxed at about 320gb)
 
That deal actually sounds kind of tempting, though I'll probably just get a 500+GB SSD when I get around to it. The main thing holding me back is not wanting to go through the hassle of a reinstall. Still, if you have a 500GB Steam folder and don't have the budget to put it on an SSD a VRap is the second fastest option that doesn't involve as SAS controller. For some games and apps seek time doesn't matter much, but for some it helps a good bit.
 
New Raptors are really quiet compared to older versions, but there is still a noticeable noise compared to recent 7200RPM drives (comparing to WD blue/black here). Maybe it's not a noise everyone can hear since it seems relativity high pitched but I can definitely tell from ear alone that they are spinning much faster.
Some PC cases may mitigate the noise better than mine mind you, but while I find the motor noise of recent 7200RPM drives to be smooth and not really unpleasant, the Raptors definitely get on my nerves in a quiet room.

They are definitely fast and feel good with those access times but given the price I feel a SSD is a better deal unless you really have 1TB of applications that need top performance. Most games don't even benefit much if at all from a SSD so keep that in mind :)

For games I'd just get a 1TB WB blue (1TB platter version, WD10EZEX ) or a black one (if they finally made a 1TB platter version, which I'm not entirely sure of) Cheap and about 200 MB/S on the outer platter, good stuff. Just make sure to partition it and put your games near the outer edge of the drive to get the full benefits of those speeds and reduce access times greatly.
Here's an ATTO benchmark of the first 100Gb of this (blue) drive - partition that I use for BF4 and TESO atm : http://i.imgur.com/ZC0BZ7C.png & average access time about 8.3ms.
 
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