Raptor worth it?

Do you guys thinks id notice a difference if i got a raptor?

I currently just use a 80gig and 160gig WD IDE's, the 80gig of which is 2mb cache.

Id probably keep thr 160 as storage, give the 80 to my sister, and use the raptor as the OS?

its fast as a boot up drive/os drive

you will notice the speed increase in installing stuff unzipping and espescially booting

but that speed worth almost triple the price per gig.

i have a 74 gig raptor and it loads xp in about 30 seconds

I went from a 120Gb seagate 7200rpm 8mb drive to a 74Gb Raptor and it is faster and snappier, but yeah, its still a little hard to justify the priceerformance. Its a tough call, but I don't really think that it is worth it. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have just gotten a really nice 7200rpm drive instead. But don't get me wrong, I still love my raptor

Hmmmmm, i think ill leave it then, hehe.

Yeah 120quid is a little bit to much, and 36gigs, is to small.

I had a raptor (36 gig) and a 120 GB drive for my first build. For my next build, I used 2x7200 rpm 8MB cache drives in RAID 0. Very little difference in price or speed but lots more storage space.

cherryp00t said:

its fast as a boot up drive/os drive

you will notice the speed increase in installing stuff unzipping and espescially booting

but that speed worth almost triple the price per gig.

i have a 74 gig raptor and it loads xp in about 30 seconds

Click to expand...

30 seconds!!! my IDE's drive do that!!! my xp boots from bios in about 11 seconds.....


Yes a raptor is a great increase - if you dont mind the prive - get a 74g if u can.

IMO theyre not worth the money - get more space and be slightly slower, then pocket the cash youve saved

I noticed a good amount of difference with the 74GB Raptor. It responds a lot faster, you can just tell by clicking on big files. Plus transfers and videos games will have an easier time, less hesitation.

Why not get the HDD with 16mb cache, as the are right behinf the raptor on speed.

yeah I agree with wicked, you can get a 300gb maxtor drive for 200 and it's a nice performer.

Upgrading to a Raptor from a 7200RPM drive, I did not notice a difference at all. I don't know why.

WHOA! Don't dog on the Raptors now.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2073&p=4

A Raptor will put a smile on your face

I have two in raid 0, OMFG! they are so fast.

The maxtor maxline III's are very comparable to 36GB raptors with much more capacity, while 74GB raptors do considerably better in a desktop/gaming environment looking at IO/sec. You should run compares at storagereview.com in their performance database to compare.

From running a 36GB raptor, I can say that the difference in performance is great. I've run RAID, and the transfer was nice there, but you cannot mimic the access times of a raptor. Responsiveness improvement is readily noticeable.

I bought mine used, as many people sell off to upgrade to the 74GB version, as it does have advantages over its older brother.

Grov said:

Do you guys thinks id notice a difference if i got a raptor?

I currently just use a 80gig and 160gig WD IDE's, the 80gig of which is 2mb cache.

Id probably keep thr 160 as storage, give the 80 to my sister, and use the raptor as the OS?

Click to expand...

I upgraded from 40Gb 5400RPM ATA133 drive to 70Gb Raptor. Well first of all the five years warranty for Raptor is something I like. HDDs do break down. Getting a good warranty at least gets you a replacement drive

The speed, yeah, now I can boot-up my computer much faster. No more waiting eternity for Win2k to bootup with my XP2600+. It only takes little more than one minute before I can load whatever programm I like (from the timepoint I press the powerputton)...

Ghosting my C-drive (to a 5400rpm ata100hdd) goes around 1,2Gb/min. It's convenient! I've a backupdrive for most important stuff. It's 40Gb Samsung. It works good as a backup device.

Loading any proggram is way faster than with my old hdd. It was well worth the price for me to upgrade from parallel ata 5400rpm drive to Raptor.

Grov said:

Do you guys thinks id notice a difference if i got a raptor?

I currently just use a 80gig and 160gig WD IDE's, the 80gig of which is 2mb cache.

Click to expand...

It's hard to tell if you would notice. No offence, but a huge number of users simply don't know what they are looking at. It's really hard to tell which type a particular person is.

My recent boot drive setups have been 2x80GB SATA HGST 7k250s on the ICH5-R in RAID0, a single 160GB PATA 7k250, and currently a Raptor 74. The differences are pretty subtle, but they are cetrainly there.

Both RAID0 and non-native SATA (which is what Raptors and 7k250s are) degrade latency slightly. The 7k250 has the best seek performance of the 7200rpm drives. The net result was moving from my PATA 7k250 to the Raptor 74 was not as great an improvement as one might think. The Raptor is faster, but numerical comparison is not impressive. My PATA 7k250 loading XP in 33 seconds, the Raptor 74 in 30.

The drive is definitely snappier in practice, but it's hard to recommend the purchase to those that are not really picky. For most users a 7k250 or one of the new native SATA Maxtors will seem a better value. But at some point, after having exhausted all other application performance-enhancing options, the only way to build a faster computer (in everyday use) is to get a Raptor--cost-effective or not. Only you can decide if you are at that point.

In any event, I would not recommend the 36GB Raptor. The 74GB model is improved, it is that much less likely you would appreciate the improvement the 36GB would bring, given that even the 74 is not revolutionary in all cases.

I've noticed a slight difference in boot up and snapier applications. It is nice though gotta say that, just have my apps, OS, and the games that I play the most (like 1 or 2 of them) on the drive. After I played them they get shifted over to my 80gig games drive.

Anyways I upgraded from a 60gig 2mb drive to this raptor, its noticable in speed for doing files and such, but really game preformance is the same. Its overall benifit of mine is that it makes me watch what I install and when I should clean my system Most of the drives these days are plenty fast, expecially since now the 16MB cache ones are starting to come out, so suggest just getting a nice 100-300gig drive, it will serve you well