74gb raptor not that impressive to me. help

Ok did I do something wrong or what? After all the reviews I have read on the raptor I was hyped and had to have one. I ordered it threw it in my machine and was ready to be impressed. Well I wasn't and considering the money I was dissappointed.

I replaced a wd 7200rpm ide drive with a raptor and the speed gains are very small and only noticed with booting. Nothing in gaming. My machine will boot about one loading bar faster with the raptor than with the ide drive. Load times in battlefield 2 are the same. I went from 200 gb to 74gb and wasted a lot of money to boot.

In the group I play games with one guy is running the exact machine I am except for he has two seagate 7200rpm drives in raid and a gig less memory and he is beating me into servers. Another guy is running pretty close to me just a little lower end mobo and memory and running and ide drive and he is beating me into servers. My connection is even faster than the guy with the ide drive.

I am running the raptor and an ide drive. Is the ide drive pulling my system down for some reason? I use the raptor for my OS and my games and use the ide drive for storage.

I copied my boot drive to the raptor and did not do a fresh windows install due to the hassell of reloading everything. Could something not be configured correctly?

If anyone has any ideas I would love to hear them so maybe I can be as excited about the raptor as everyone else seems to be.

I would try a fresh install, that's what I think the problem is. Let's see what other members have to say but I think the last resort is try a fresh install.

Everytime I install a new hard drive I reformat since all my data is on a storage drive.

I thought about it but I have so many things I really did not want to reload. Plus all the drivers for my wireless stuff and etc etc etc. I did it the lazy way but I may have to break down and just reformat everything. I just wanted make sure that the ide drive is not conflicting with it for some reason or something else that I may have missed.

I noticed a large increase, and my raptors not even my Windows drive. Everyone can tell the difference between 5400rpm and 7200rpm easily... no question about that. Why not 10k rpm?

thats pretty much what I am asking.

Why don't you benchmark it and see what happens? See if your number match up with those of reviews.

^^ exactly - when i got my raptor over my 120g 8mb IDE it flew!! i think a fresh install might be in order - maybe just make an HD image of your C drive - save it on your back up drive - do a fresh format to try it out - if it doesnt make a diff, relaod your image.

Mr.Guvernment said:

^^ exactly - when i got my raptor over my 120g 8mb IDE it flew!! i tyhink a fresh install might be in order - mabye just make an HD image iof your C drive - sagve it on your abck up drive - do a fresh format to try it out - if it doesnt makea diff, relaod your image.

Click to expand...

Good idea

Yea I have 99% of everything backed up still on the drive I took out and replaced with the raptor. I figured I should have done a fresh install to begin with but it was just so easy to copy it all and change out the drives and boot her up. I was in a hurry to see what it would do. Thanks for the input guys.

guess I will load from scratch again.....

1. Installing games like FarCry, UT2004, etc... Not faster?

2. Loading games like AoE3 demo, Fear Demo, etc.. Not faster?

3. HD Tach benchmarks: 74gb Raptor vs. IDE w/8mb Cache....not faster?

4. PCMark05.....not faster?

Do you have a scsi based system your not telling us about?

If you don't like it, then return it and stop complaining. We're hear to help you figure out if and why it's not working properly, and it is. Sorry if it doesn't open a wormhole to the next dimension, but I'm quite happy with mine.

apu318 I assume you are talking to some else and not me because I am not complaining so much as asking if I did something wrong.

Sorry, I should have clarified that. I meant to direct that towards bleagh.

thats what I thought but I wanted to make sure. I order the stuff to make my ide dirve and external drive. When I get it in I am gonna pull out my sotrage ide drive and reformat the raptor and run it alone and only plug the other one up when I need it. get the old nasty ide cables out anyway. I may even put the ide to sata adaptor on my dvd drive and see where that takes me.

I think my raptor was a waste of money, the only good thing is the 5 year warranty. In real world performance I don't find it much faster then any regular sata hard drive. I only really notice it in benchmarking and thats about it.

I just had a similar experinace, but on a differnet contoller type, but I did have to do some hunting to experiance why I shelled out hard earned money for a new drive setup.

When I went from regular IDE to RAID0 I was looking for the large speed deamon increase. To a degree I got the larger boost. It is just in spots I never thought to look. Someplaces I wonder why I got the drives setup. I forgot to look at access times.

First I did the fumble around trying to find the optimal setup to match my needs. That was not fun, but interesting. Once I got the drivers and other settings that suited my needs out of the way. I went to the second part looking for the increase. Real world use. (I knew I got the RAID) for a specific reason and went looking in that direction after I tested other mundane tasks that afect my daily usage. I got a big yawn. No major head turning.

Once I tested what I had against what I have. The setup really gave me a smile. I found my large boost. I seen the times of various aspects, i.e. - booting, loads, file transfers ect. Against my previous drive there was not a huge increase, but very noticable. Now I can transfer information around on the drive(s) with the speeds I was hoping for(within my expectations) and access files faster. I knew why I got the drives, and what my goals for getting them were. I am not disappointed nor completely impressed.

Now to get past the setting the hardware up to match my needs, versus the now I am happy I got the hardware. I matched the hardware to the machine. I as of yet found it to be not bottlenecking my rig overall or find any bottlenecks to hold the speeds back. I didn't expect a mircle increase though. Just overall faster happenings. I got what I expected for the intended usage.

Try running HDTach and see if your transfer speeds are SATA I standards. I have heard of windows switching it to slower speeds sometimes. I am not certain on the specifics but someone else here might be.

If you cant tell the difference between a Raptor vs. ATA/1xx, what CAN you tell the difference of?

My 80 gig WDSE has my windows partition on it. When I added the raptor and installed all my games on it 'n such... i noticed a huge difference in load times.

I would try a fresh install on the IDE, and then setup the raptor as a "applications" drive. You should see a difference.