BF2S Forums Using a Raptor and a SATA 8mb 250gb WD HD

mtm87tx wrote:

my good buddy VJS has told me that a Raptor hard drive is far superior to a standard SATA HD. so im taking his advice and buying one. my question is am i loosing anything using my 250gb Western Digital with 8mb cache AND the Raptor? would this slow the Raptor down any? can someone link me a raptor i cant seem to find them on newegg.com. is it the 15k ones?

they seem pretty expensive are they worth the money? also on another note, do they make a CD-ROM drive that reads faster than any other ones? thanks guys

raptors make a lot of noise, no ur 250gb hdd wont be lost and u can make it a partition

can i put what i have in RAID 0? just a single?

Raid is always faster but you don't get a benifit with seek times.
My buddy has a nearly identical machine to mine except he has 2 raptors in a raid-0, I have a single 15K scsi drive.
My scsi beats his machine into rounds 100% of the time.

So bandwidth (Transfer speed of raid-0) is not the only factor seek time is the major player. When a map is loaded your not transfering a single 1G file from one portion of the drive to another. Your accessing a bunch of small files and reading them into memory.

The WD 3G drives have 7200 RPM spindle speed compared to the raptors 10K, seek times really count for alot.

Also the raptors are not that loud, if your machine is ultra quite now you may hear the Raptors but it's probably not going to bother you.

Check out this article...

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.h … p;chart=32

For comparision purposes my 15K scsi has a 3ms seek time compared to the raptors 8ms and that WD's 12ms.

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You have two options a raid-0 of two identical 7200rpm drives or buying Raptor.

raid-0 option:

- Faster overall reading of individual files
- 12ms seek time (not great)
- data relyability not good since if either of the drives fail you loose everything
- Requires CPU processor time to interpret the strip (raid-0)

current drive with raptor

- 8ms seek time quite a bit better
- better data relyability (you could actually backup important data from one drive to the other)
- little to no cpu overhead

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My money would be on the raptor loading into games faster than the raid-0, could be wrong but it would be close either way. Personally I'd never buy another 7200rpm drive for anything other than storage or downloading p0rn.  If they would only wake-up and make 15K raptors, but by that time 22k scsi will probably be out.

Last edited by vjs (2006-03-30 15:22:02)

99Ram2500 wrote:

Two sata 3g WD drives are pretty much even with two WD raptor drives in RAID 0 when it comes to loading
times, etc.    Kills the raptors when it comes to data transferring/interface speed. 

Id do two WD 3g drives, 160gb~300gb, in raid 0.  They can be had for $80-140 each.

raid 0 on them cost less and is faster than a single raptor.. and significantly more storage space. Not to mention quieter.

If it matters, i have two 250 sata 3gs in raid 0 and i get one and a half "progress bars" to load XP pro sp2.  fast fast fast

In benchmarks the raptors will nearly always win, because benchmarks arent dealing with large ammounts of data.

When im moving 3gb of porn around, im glad i have these and not raptors.. and trust me.. im impatient with my porn.

hmm well i have 2 x 74gb raptors in raid0 and 2 x 250gb barracuda 7200.9 in raid 0, raptors kill the barras in games and havent really tested anything else , but i have no problem with the sound when the sound is pumpin through me Z-5500's

mtm87tx wrote:

so i should buy 1 74gb raptor and put my games on it and keep this 250 for music and stuff? does the OS go on the raptor to?

should i wait and just get a 22k when they come out since what i have works? seems like they would be really high. i dont have any load issues now. at least twice as fast as my old system

If you really want a speed demon, You should get the new 150GB Raptor. It now has a 16MB buffer and NCQ.

http://www.wdraptorx.com/specifications/

They cost double what the old Raptors did though.

I know my WD2500KS storage drive kicks my old Raptor ass in speed. The next time I format and reload Windows, I will be loading my game on the WD2500KS drive.

Last edited by torinogtman (2006-04-03 12:34:14)

i had to wd 80gb satas in raid 0 and gave up. i ended up with broken arrays every other week