Looking to buy a new HD, gotta say i no nothing really about them. Overclockers.co.uk currently have a slight discount on them was tempted to pick up a 150GB model. So as the title suggested are they worth it say over two 7,200RPM running RAID 0. Cheers
Raptors are expensive but you get what you pay for in higher speeds which end up being lower loading times. Maybe some day the price per gig will come down on raptors.
Look at these benchmarks. The Raptor drive is faster but for gaming the actual performance gain you'll see is a few seconds decrease in loading times on some games. The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 featuring perpendicular recording technology is only £62.95 (£73.97 Including VAT) and will give you 320GB and loading times a few seconds behind a 150GB raptor. Two of these in RAID 0 would make the performance gap even smaller.
i have a 74 raptor, and am very pleased with it. especially load times. and the gain in load times with raid is almost non-existant. http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q4/chipset-raid/index.x?pg=6
You do get something for the money, but the question is really is it worth paying double for, and I think the answer has to be no, and this is more or less your typical high-end pricing where price and gain are totally out of proportion. That said, the raptor is an enterprise-class product and certaily superior so if paying for the best is acceptable then I'd say do it. Edit: Yeah, I agree that raided 7k drives don't add up to one 10k drive. Funny, but RAID just doesn't seem to help much (or for the desktop anyway), a bit like dual-channel RAM I suppose...
Thanks for the feedback guys. So most you believe the Raptor isnt worth the extra £. And to pick up 2 of the seagate perpendicular drives instead.
I have the raptor and I love it Fast game install times and faster boots. It's great for all of it. -Satan
Price/Performance ratio not good. Also if your a person that happens to do P2P alot (like me) I just dont fancy the idea of a 10,000 rpm drive running 24/7 as I dont think it would live nearly as long. those SATAII WD Caviliers with the 16mb cache are great drives very low on price now and have tons of space and stil run fast. I got the 250gb model long time ago and it has done really great for me, silent running and high performance. the 500gb model was on sale for 200$ at the egg last week, cant beat that.
I have 2 74gb rapters in a raid 0 and 1 500gb wd for all the other crap and it's fast the 74's arn't to bad in price i think they where like 160 a piece on newegg a few months ago when i was building a new system and decided to just drop the money in my current rig instead...
raptors are now really not worth it with perpendicular recording now perpendicular recording has amazing burst and seek speeds... faster than the raptors... the raptors still win in read and write, but perpendicular is faster in burst and seek... and that equalizes against read and write u should just get two 250 gb seagate perpendicular recording drives... it will own two raptors in seek and burst... and come very close in read and write... for cheaper... 2 of those will cost around 100-150 us dollars... cheap
the burst speeds of any sata300 drive are faster than a raptor, because the raptor is sata150. and burst speeds arent that important, they are read out of the cache, and maybe 1% of the time you are doing only that in use. and a 7k2 drive cant have faster seek times that a 10k drive, thats mechanically impossible.
10k and 15k drives have been around for a very long time just in SCSI instead of ATA, and I'm sure they tend to last longer than desktop drives as they are all warrantied for 5 years of constant use. It may well be that some of this extra cost we see with these raptors just is in making them being able to take the extra strain, which might also explain why nobody seems very interested in mainstreaming 10k drives.
