Raptor alternatives

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Go to www.storagereview.com for good information on hard disk performance. The bottom line is that the raptor150 is the best performer in real life single user environments. Why the 150 and not 74g if you only need 74g? The 150 will have more data under the faster outer cylinders of the drive. My raptor is not loud, my fans make more noise. I have to look at the HDD activity light to be assured that it is running.
 

Bazukaz

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The main factor that makes Raptors fast is not the data transfer rate , but seek time. For example , when you copy a file from one disc location to another, the heads must jump very fast because data is read and written in small chunks. So even 4 or more standard HDD's in RAID 0 may not reach the performance of a single Raptor in some cases.
Thats my personal opinion - i have had no ability to try Raptors , but tried Raid 0 - and saw no significant performance improvement.
 

enewmen

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You sound like you know something about hard-drives.
What's the "click" sound (from the 7200.10s) ?
Some drives click, some don't. Seems to work OK though.
Any worries?
thanks!
 

darksidedragon

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Yeah, it is possible with the Intel Matrix RAID setup (it's not the same as RAID 0+1). I think most new Intel based motherboards support it as standard, and from what I've read on the net, it seems to be fairly simply to do.
 

darksidedragon

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who the hell told you they were noisy? they are no worse than any other drive, I got one and a 500gb samsung storage drive and they are no louder/quiter than each other.

Not so much told me, but I put a raptor in my friends PC that I built him recently. I suspect it's mainly the fact that his case is pretty lame, but still seems excessively loud.

Bazukaz - seek time obviously isn't affected by RAID 0 (as I'm sure you know). I think it's just through put that's affected, so large amounts of data can be transferred quicker. I'd imagine copying files between RAID 0 and other drives would be limited by the non-RAID drive, if that's what you were referring to.
 

ethel

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Wow, I stirred up a hornet's nest with my comments about RAID 0, eh?

RAID 0 with an onboard controller is not worth it for the small benefit that you may get (my links above and PETEvsDRM's show you the proof of that) and you are taking a bigger risk with the data side of things, so why bother?

If you're worried about the noise (and I agree that Raptors are a little noisy), just get a 7200.10 - these are fast, cheap and quiet. You won't be disappointed.

Personally I run a Raptor and a 15K SCSI drive - but my drives are suspended so they're extremely quiet.
 

coverfire

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Built a system for a friend using a single of those seagate 250gb drives and was very impressed with speed and load times. You will not be dissapointed with two in Raid 0.

Raptors at this point seem too overpriced when I could just get two 80gb SATA2 drives Raid 0 and still be faster than a singel raptor and cheaper.

And if you do go raid 0 don't be a bonehead and put important documents on it since if one fails they all fail.

I've been running various raid configs on onboard raid controllers since SATA2 came out and have had no issues even in RAID 0 (maybe I'm just lucky)

Last system built I had 4 SATA2 drives in raid 0 (very fast 200+mbs) Never had a glitch, problem or failure.

Just back things up properly and don't be paranoid.
 
Sorry to say, ethel is right; raid-0 shows well in artificial benchmarks, but this does not translate into any real benefits for you and me as single desktop users . I have used raid-0 with the original raptor, SCSI 15k drives, and their performance is not noticeably different from a single 150gb current raptor. Do the research. Why might this be? If a data record is split up into two parts and put on two drives, then it takes two i/o operations to read it in. The positioning(seek) is independent and the reads might happen concurrently. For big sequential reads, this is good. For short random reads, this is bad. If you are using that second core of your C2D, you might be doing i/o that steals the actuator and negates this nice sequential scenario.
While we are at it, NCQ(non-sequential queueing) sounds nice, but for the single desktop user it can actually hurt. It is designed for a server environment with many concurrent random reads.
None the less, do not fear your data exposure in raid-0 for two reasons:
1) The Mean time to failure of a raptor is supposed to be 1.2 million hours. At 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, that is 136 years. Even with several, you are not going to fail often.
2) If you have data that you don't want to lose; BACK IT UP! Raid-1 and the other variants just reduce the recovery time.
 

darksidedragon

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As I've said before - I have an external HDD for back up, as well as a flash disk drive for seriously important stuff. I think I'm gonna go with a Raptor, just to see how it compares to my current drives. Plus, RAID 0 improvements seem to be so debated, at least I know for sure that there will be a slight performance improvement from the raptor due to the lower seek time. Yes, they're overpriced for what they are, but I can actually afford one, considering the recent price drops in memory due to the release of DDR3. Hopefully, the dampening in the case should be sufficient. If not, I'll look at some of the solutions on QuietPC.com.
 

f61

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We're not done comparing yet. This just in... checkout this one at the egg

WD1600YS

BUT!, you MUST download the firmware revision, else the HDD might drop out of RAID.

Read thoroughly and stare at the specs. Reviews are important.
SIXTY BUCKS.

f61
 

powerbaselx

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Actually with Intel matrix raid, you can have different types of arrays on the same two disks.

Check it out.
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm

Ok, interesting. Wonder if i could change 'on-the-fly' the volumes and resize my RAID 0 volume to get free unused space to create a new RAID 1 volume....
 

frankienyc123

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Ive tried both Raid 0 using a pair of WD "raid edition" drives and the 74gig Raptor. I agree the Raptors are alot of money, but they definitly felt faster in everyday use compared to the Raid0 setup. To be honest though the Raptors are to expensive for the small increase of performance they offer, they are only for those that want the best of everything. Your better off spending that extra money on components that can make a significant differance in performance like the cpu, gpu, memory...etc