Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 16mb cache good for gaming ?

[meatnub]

I'm getting the GA-P35-DS3R, E6420 (OC to 3.2), Crucial 2x1GB RAM.

I don't want to drop $150 for a 75 gig Raptor.

I am not too keen on doing Raid 0.

So will a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 3gb/sec 16mb HDD be fine for gaming?

 

[akahuddy]

It works beautifully. I used one and never had any problems with games such as HL2:LC or COH.

 

[jt001]

Hard drives have very little impact on gaming, but yes that is a good drive

 

[fate0n3]

You can't go wrong with them I promise you. They are great drives I have 2 250gig 7200.10 in a RAID 0 and I love them. Quiet, run pretty cool (alot cooler then my old raptor). Now Performance a Raptor is faster, now is it noticeably different No in benchies yes. Or at least I could not tell a HUGE different. Is the difference worth the extra for some yes for others no. Like i said before they are great drives I love mine.

 

[mordenkhai]

I use 3 320GB models and love them.

 

[Gundam1s]

Yes, they are great but they do get HOT!

 

[fate0n3]

All hard drives do get warm now I can say mine stay cool in my case i can touch them after running them all day long gaming, internet browsing, etc, etc. And they are cool now my case does have a 120mm fan on them but compared to a raptor these drives are very cool running drives. My raptor would get hot you could feel the heat come off of it even with them 120mm on it. That is the reason i took it back and decided to get 2 of the 7200.10 and put them in a Raid 0. This is my 2 cents then again how hot something really is, depends on what you are basing it against.

 

[Zorg]

That is the reason i took it back

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

[rammedstein]

the seagates are good, check out the harddrive charts on this very site if you want to see performance numbers.

 

[Kronos76]

Hate to steal the thread, but I am wondering, and value in going wit the ES over the 7200.10 in the 500G class? Price difference is obvious, and I have read they are suppose to be more reliable, but what about performance. Just thought it may be relevant as the OP may want to consider this as an option....

 

[Techfan]

Hard drives don't make any difference in games. The frame rates depend mostly from your Graphics card, CPU and RAM. However, you can notice the difference when the game is loading. But anyway even when loading the WD Raptor 74GB 10K drive compared to Seagate Baracuda 7200 is 15% faster average. It doesn't justify the extra cost.

 

[leexgx]

2 80gb hdd set them up in RAID 0 and 1 500gb hdd for back up (Ghost the disk or just use it for back up )

best performace with back up (me 4x80gb +500gb {2x for vista raid 0 2x for XP raid 0})

i would not raid 2x 500gb hdds in raid 0 just asking for alot of data to be lost even if segate hdd are very good and do not fail offen lose an disk loes date off Both disks and its basicly 1% chance of getting any data off it more 0% if it has failed

 

[fraggelrock]

I run mine for Quake 4, it is great!!

 

[ZOldDude]

The new 7200.11 revision drive that Seagate just came out with has the highest transfer rate (105 MBps per drive).
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32622/118/

Raptors run hot,are overpriced and now a thing of the past.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

The new 7200.11 revision drive that Seagate just came out with has the highest transfer rate (105 MBps per drive).
Raptors run hot,are overpriced and now a thing of the past.

Heat: The active power dissipation of the WD1500ADFD and the new Seagate 1TB drive are equal (11.6 W). They put out the same amount of heat, and will run at the same temperature in identical set-ups.

Speed: The Seagate 1TB drives have a much higher maximum transfer rate than the Raptor (105 MB/sec vs. 80 MB/sec), but the difference is less when comparing the average transfer rate. (Raptor's speed drops less than the Seagate's does due to the smaller diameter platter).

It has been well-researched that for the home user, transfer rate doesn't get you too much in terms of game load times and Windows boot times (look at the RAID-0 threads). Transfer rate can matter greatly in certain applications (Photo and video editing, DVD production).

The Raptor is still the winner in terms of access time (~8 msec vs. 12 msec for the Seagate), and always will be against any 7200 RPM drive. Access time can mean more when working with many small files, or applications using many small reads accessed randomly (databases).

Also, let's not forget that the 105 MB/sec is the fastest drive announced targeted at the desktop market, but nowhere near the fastest hard drive out there. The Seagate Savvio 15K.1 (SAS) does 108 MB/sec (available for the last 12 months), and the Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 (U320 SCSI) does 135 MB/sec (available for the last 24 months).

Thing of the past: The Raptor isn't and was never meant to be a gamer's or enthusiast's drive. It is an Enterprise drive, targeted at the market where fast access times and high reliability (1.2 Mhours MTBF) mean much more than quantity of storage (again, databases and 24/7 servers). Many enterprises will continue to use the Raptor because the additional cost of SCSI/SAS is not justified in light of the Raptor's nearly comparable high performance at a fraction of that cost.

 

[Taft12]

Thing of the past: The Raptor isn't and was never meant to be a gamer's or enthusiast's drive. It is an Enterprise drive, targeted at the market where fast access times and high reliability (1.2 Mhours MTBF) mean much more than quantity of storage (again, databases and 24/7 servers). Many enterprises will continue to use the Raptor because the additional cost of SCSI/SAS is not justified in light of the Raptor's nearly comparable high performance at a fraction of that cost.

I'm not sure where you got this idea, it's not remotely accurate. I've never seen WD put an ad for Raptor drives in any IT publication, yet they advertise all over PC hardware enthusiast sites like this one.

The product page claims "This is the ultimate hard drive for PC performance enthusiasts everywhere.", and last but not least THEY PUT A FREAKING WINDOW ON THE DRIVE! This is not a feature enterprise users are clamouring for. You can't buy a Raptor in a Dell, IBM or HP server. Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you, but you are way off man.

 

[Kronos76]

Thing of the past: The Raptor isn't and was never meant to be a gamer's or enthusiast's drive. It is an Enterprise drive, targeted at the market where fast access times and high reliability (1.2 Mhours MTBF) mean much more than quantity of storage (again, databases and 24/7 servers). Many enterprises will continue to use the Raptor because the additional cost of SCSI/SAS is not justified in light of the Raptor's nearly comparable high performance at a fraction of that cost.

I'm not sure where you got this idea, it's not remotely accurate. I've never seen WD put an ad for Raptor drives in any IT publication, yet they advertise all over PC hardware enthusiast sites like this one.

The product page claims "This is the ultimate hard drive for PC performance enthusiasts everywhere.", and last but not least THEY PUT A FREAKING WINDOW ON THE DRIVE! This is not a feature enterprise users are clamouring for. You can't buy a Raptor in a Dell, IBM or HP server. Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you, but you are way off man.

Hate to say it, but Somejoe7777 is right actually, while it never made it big in the enterprise world some of your smaller environments did use the drive. Check out the article from anandtech below. While even they recognize it did not fair well and later became the drive for enthusiasts it was actually designed and used in enterprise systems.

The original Raptor was launched as the WD360GD in March of 2003 with an enterprise level 10,000 RPM spindle speed, SATA interface, 8-Megabyte buffer, 5.2 millisecond read seek time, and a single-platter design featuring 36 gigabytes of storage. While it shined in single-user performance, the drive did not fare well against its SCSI based competitors in the enterprise server market for which it was designed.

Full Article
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2690,

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I'm not sure where you got this idea, it's not remotely accurate. I've never seen WD put an ad for Raptor drives in any IT publication, yet they advertise all over PC hardware enthusiast sites like this one.

The product page claims "This is the ultimate hard drive for PC performance enthusiasts everywhere.", and last but not least THEY PUT A FREAKING WINDOW ON THE DRIVE! This is not a feature enterprise users are clamouring for. You can't buy a Raptor in a Dell, IBM or HP server. Sorry if it seems like I'm picking on you, but you are way off man.

No, I'm not way off.

Go to Western Digital's home page. http://www.westerndigital.com

On the left side, click on Enterprise Drives. The Raptor is the first hard drive listed.

Underneath it, it says:

Built for speed! WD Raptor is a unique class of hard drives that matches SCSI reliability and performance while providing simplified connectivity – all at less cost than Parallel SCSI drives.

Key Features:

World's only 10,000 RPM SATA drive
1.2 million hrs. MTBF at 100% duty cycle

Ideal for:

High-speed servers, network attached storage and workstations.

Click on the Raptor drive itself to go to the product page. There, it says:

Some hard drive companies design desktop-class drives with the SATA interface. To meet the demands of enterprise storage, WD is going one better. WD is the only company combining a 10,000 RPM enterprise-class mechanical platform with the SATA interface to meet all the demands of the enterprise environment—reliability, performance, and reduced cost.

Under the overview, it says:

WD produces the world’s most reliable SATA drives. With 1.2 million hours MTBF, enterprise duty cycle, 5-year limited warranty, next-generation SATA technology, and state-of-the-art vibration tolerance, WD Raptor drives offer the best combination of reliability, high capacity, and performance for enterprise applications.

Under the "Applications", it says:

Servers, network attached storage, scientific computing, video surveillance, enterprise backup, document and image management, digital video.

In those short paragraphs, the words "server", "workstation", or "enterprise" are mentioned NINE times.

Kronos is correct, the Raptor never made really big inroads into the Enterprise market because higher end server companies like HP, Dell, and IBM continued to produce servers that use SCSI drives, and WD doesn't have a SCSI division.

Once WD saw that enthusiasts were flocking to the Raptor because of the speed and SATA interface, they hopped on the bandwagon with the Raptor X (which includes the window). The Raptor X is marketed as a desktop/enthusiast drive on WD's website, but the specs on the Raptor X (WD1500AHFD) are exactly the same as the specs on the regular Raptor (WD1500ADFD), including the 1.2M hours MTBF.

But even after the Raptor became an enthusiasts' choice, WD has not diminished marketing of the Raptor as an enterprise drive. That is still the purpose it was built for. The enterprise features of the drive that you won't find in many desktop drives are:

- 10K RPM (still the only 10K SATA drive there is)
- NCQ (Many SATA drives have this now, but the Raptors had it way before anything else. It was meant to compete with SCSI's command queueing, which is necessary for good file server performance. It does little for desktop systems).
- TLER/Time-Limited Error Recovery (Meant exclusively for RAID systems)
- RAFF/Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (Additional motor servo control to combat vibration when the drive is in a RAID enclosure and subjected to the vibration of adjacent drives).
- 1.2M hours MTBF (Considered very high reliability, not present in desktop drives).
- 5 Year warranty (some desktop drives have this, but most are 3 year).


The Raptor is an Enterprise drive, from the ground up. No question about it.

Edit: Corrected information regarding Raptor X MTBF.

 

[zirpeo]

Techfan :Hard drives don't make any difference in games

Hard drives have very little impact on gaming, but yes that is a good drive - - -
Techfan :Hard drives don't make any difference in games ---

not picking on you PPL no offence, but those are incompetent comments, and plain wrong,
a hard drive determines practicallly all of the games performance, the game stores itself into page
file even if you shut pagefile off, because a game needs a pagefile as a destination to execute itself
and games dont see ram as destination because ram acts as a large cache / buffer, Page fille speed
is crucial for perfomance and page file speed is determined by the hard drives sustained transfer rate and seek time.
so even if you have a nvidia 8800 GTX , if you have a slow hard drive, your games will stutter and get
low frames, and loading times(not pagefile related) will suffer, regardless of ram size and what video
card you own. Any drive with an STR less than 80MB/s is not recommended for pc games.

 

[zirpeo]

and if you plan on doing uncompressed video editing or playing massive games like
oblivion @100FPS with details maxed out forget 80MB/s, youll need
a drive that can do at least 150MB/s