WD VelociRaptor...

[TheRift]

So, who has a WD VelociRaptor 150GB or 300GB drive? How has it improved your PC experience?

Curious to know whether they're actually worth 7 times the price of a 7200rpm drive.

 

[Ry4n]

SSD's offer better performance than mechnical drives ATM I think - but yeah I think fast hard drives are worth the money - not so much for storing data but for your OS and Applications.
I've upgraded my PC many times and I've neva noticed such a performace increase after replacing my laptop hard drive with a OCZ Vertex SSD which perfoms a little faster than the VelociRaptor @ 200mB/sec.
Windows 7 boots in 26 seconds - including logging in and loading up all procceses.
Basically it will increase the speed programs open and browsing around your drive, which you probably already know.

Take a look at this -> [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg[/ame]

 

[howardb]

I'd rather go with SSD...

 

[TheRift]

Except ofcourse one pays double that of the Raptor.
I'm curious as to how much better in the real world the Raptor is as a main drive, and not interested in SSD.

 

[bdt]

Here's some wacky-wack for you: format a Seagate 'cuda 1.5TB to mimic the 'raptor ..yes folks, some nutter did exactly that! His conclusion: (emphasis mine)

It looks like Seagate inadvertently created something marvelous by creating arguably the best consumer drive on the market. As you have seen from the benchmarks, the Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS outperforms the Velociraptor in almost all categories. Coming in at $119.99 at newegg.com, the Barracuda is also approximately $110 cheaper when compared to the Velociraptor’s $229.99 price tag at newegg.com. The huge price difference makes the conclusion very simple, the Barracuda wins in both performance per price as well as raw performance thus making it a better buy than the Velociraptor. No matter what your budget for a computer is, having an extra $110 just means that it could be better spent in other components of your system such as RAM of a Graphics card.

 

[Stickfigure]

If you want to get a SSD, wait till next year. They're still horribly over priced.

 

[bdt]

So, Prophecy has the 'raptor at > R3k and the 'cuda 1.5TB at pretty much half that ( ~R1600).

Seems to me a worthwhile bet to do a FakeRaptor at 300gig or 819gig ..you could always revert to the 1.5TB later (I think, I didn't re-read the article now)

 

[chickenbeef]

If there is anyone here who wants to sponsor me a Velociraptor or a Barracuda, pm me

 

[Picard]

If there is anyone here who wants to sponsor me a Velociraptor or a Barracuda, pm me

If you get what you want please sponsor me with what you have.

 

[TheRift]

My god, does the Cuda eat the Raptor in those tests!

I'd feel real guilty though losing 1.2TB or 600GB of usable space, but at half the price it sure is an incredible alternative.

I wonder if that could be done with other drives as well? Maybe something smaller where you'd lose less space (ie. short stroking on high platter count drives).

 

[TheRift]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html

 

[TheRift]

If there is anyone here who wants to sponsor me a Velociraptor or a Barracuda, pm me

Sure, I could send you a deadly lizard or a deadly fish in the mail tomorrow.

 

[bdt]

My god, does the Cuda eat the Raptor in those tests!

Yes, all well and good but ...

I'd feel real guilty though losing 1.2TB or 600GB of usable space, but at half the price it sure is an incredible alternative.

...YES - there's this feeling of deeply WRONG about doing this, it's just creepy.

 

[chickenbeef]

If you get what you want please sponsor me with what you have.

hahaha, will do, will do.....

 

[chickenbeef]

Sure, I could send you a deadly lizard or a deadly fish in the mail tomorrow.

as good as that sounds i'm going to have to decline the offer. . . Maybe picard will be interested

 

[TheRift]

 

[TheRift]

I don't really like large main drives and I'm gonna just not spend that kinda money on a Raptor nor reduce the size of a 1TB, but I've looking a bit and might consider the following drives:

- WD Caviar Black 500GB
- Samsung Spinpoint F1 500GB

Both have same disk density. Which one of those 2 would you pick?

I think the Samsung has a nice price point advantage, but in tests/reviews the Black seems to take it.

 

[chickenbeef]

Western Digital ftw, Samsung comes second followed by Seagate

imo

 

[TheRift]

Yeah, I've already added one to my build list. WD it is then. I'm not too picky on HD brand most of the time. Usually look at cost/availability, but this WD looks like the performer I can afford.

 

[killadoob]

Except ofcourse one pays double that of the Raptor.
I'm curious as to how much better in the real world the Raptor is as a main drive, and not interested in SSD.

Real world raptors are awesome, very fast. you can feel a huge difference in your system when running a raptor compared to a normal 7200rpm drive.

Everything just works faster, plug an ssd and you will not feel like a cpu upgrade.

People with 7200rpm are always upgrading their cpu's for more speed but never stop to think a faster hdd would be better than a new cpu.

For some reason people are happy to pay tons of money for vga cards, mobo's and cpu's but they want the cheapest 7200rpm they can find running windows , you can have an i7 system with a 7200rpm drive and my stock standard q9550 with a g.skill falcon will romp it in terms of performance in windows and applications.