WD Raptor vs NCQ Seagate?

[Agisthos]

Im wondering what the story is with these hard drives, From a purely gaming performance perspective which would be faster?

The Western Digital 'Raptor' drive is SATA @ 10,000rpm

The Seagate drives is SATA @ 7.200rpm but supports NCQ (if your mobo support it)

looking at cost issues the seagate wins easily but if the raptor still gives better gaming performance im up for it

 

[E4g1e]

If you're running games entirely or primarily from the hard drive, then the Raptor wins - but by a much smaller margin than many of you would have liked to believe. Sure, the seek times are noticeably quicker on the Raptor compared to the Seagate, but the sequential media-to-buffer transfer rates of both drives are almost equal.

And speaking of NCQ, only Intel's i9xx-series chipsets with the ICH6-series "southbridge" support NCQ, IIRC. Several other SATA chipsets support TCQ (which the 74GB Raptor supports), including Intel's own ICH5R (only with RAID enabled and RAID drivers installed).

 

[Agisthos]

Only the latest nforce4 ultra AMD motherboards support ncq as well.

The 78gig Raptor drive will cost me $260 AUD while an 80gig ncq seagate will cost $90 AUD

probably not worth the price difference

 

[paparodent]

Move to America, where they are cheaper ...........lol

 

[upriverpaddler]

Awwww crap .?.?.?. Will an NCQ drivework with an unsupported mobo. Asus A8N-SLI for instance?

 

[E4g1e]

Awwww crap .?.?.?. Will an NCQ drivework with an unsupported mobo. Asus A8N-SLI for instance?

A drive which supports NCQ is compatible with a controller which lacks NCQ support; it's just that command queuing cannot be enabled at all with such combos. An NCQ drive cannot support TCQ, nor vice versa.

At that point (trying to run an NCQ drive on a controller which lacks NCQ support), you might as well use P-ATA (Parallel ATA) instead of SATA (Serial ATA), since the performance of an NCQ SATA drive on a controller which does not support NCQ will be no better than a P-ATA drive on a UATA/100 controller.

 

[Enigma422]

Well if your talking FPS, then whichever HD you get won't matter, however, if your talking load times the Raptor will be faster.

 

[DougLite]

If you're running games entirely or primarily from the hard drive, then the Raptor wins - but by a much smaller margin than many of you would have liked to believe. Sure, the seek times are noticeably quicker on the Raptor compared to the Seagate, but the sequential media-to-buffer transfer rates of both drives are almost equal.

And speaking of NCQ, only Intel's i9xx-series chipsets with the ICH6-series "southbridge" support NCQ, IIRC. Several other SATA chipsets support TCQ (which the 74GB Raptor supports), including Intel's own ICH5R (only with RAID enabled and RAID drivers installed).

NCQ is part of the SATA-II feature set, along with 3 gbps transfer and hot plug. Any controller advertised as SATA-II compliant should support NCQ. I'd expect better support for NCQ rather than the Raptor's non standard TCQ implementation - the Raptor is actually a bridged PATA drive. The only native serial drives available are all Seagate SATA units and Maxtor MaxLineIII/DiamondMax10 SATA units. Hitachi 7K500, when it becomes available, will also be a native serial drive, and possibly the new Samsung 200/250GB SATA units as well. Don't look for native serial units from WD or Maxtor consumer lines anytime soon. Also, NCQ will _lower_ performance in some single user tasks, as it exacts an overhead, and can't improve performance on the highly localized typical single user access patterns, although it can increase throughput when multiple disk intensive applications are running at the same time, such as unzipping a file and running a virus scan at the same time.