Would a Raptor be worth considering?

[Yossarian]

Hi just wanted an opinion
Just built my new Vista 64 system and everythings running on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB. I read somewhere that some people use a smaller faster drive like a Raptor 36GB for the OS and leave it blank; everything else goes on the Barracuda. So would the increase in speed be worth it? My PC is very quiet atm (well in comparison to my pervious one) and I read that Raptors can be noisier than most HD's.

PC spec
Q6600 B0 step with Thermalright Ultima-90 ready for OC
4GB (2 x 2GB sticks) Crucial Ballistic Tracer DDR2 800MHz
BFG GeForce 8800GTS 512MB OC
Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS5 MB
PC Power and Cooling 750W

Also when I installed Vista I didn't see any option to partition the drive so atm its a big 500GB C drive using NTFS. Now I read I can make partitions on the drive while in Vista but is this the best option. Should I have soughted it before installation and will I incure any penalty for doing this after instillation?

Any advice would be great thanks!

 

[boonality]

Raptors are not worth the premium for the marginal speed increase. And they are very loud. You should have been able to create partitions on the screen that asks what partition do you want to install windows on.

 

[Reynod]

2 X 7200's in RAIAD 0 beats a Raptor and you get the bonus of all of the space ... the two drives are simply "interwoven" as one pseudo drive and as they both operate in parallel you get a huge performance increase.

The rest of your system is excellent ... striping two drives will give you a good performance boost you will certainly notice.

You could get greedy and put two raptors in RAID0 ... thats too pricey for me.

With a couple of drives and a quad in the box make sure your case pulls enough air through it too ... tidy up all of the cables to minimise air obstructions and clean or remove (nibble out) the mesh behind the fans.

Make sure the drives are secured with all of the screws to enable the case to remove some of the heat from the drives ... like a heatsink.

Hope this helps.

 

[Crazy-PC]

If 1 year before or more, Raptor is worth to buy for better transfer rate on single drive (without Raid) and lower Random access time. Now the transfer rate of Seagate 7200.11 is higher than Raptor and Raptor is just with lower Random Access time as benefit and it is not worth to pay more money for that.