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Raptor Drives: How Many Of U Are Using 1 Non-RAID

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AngelfireUk83

AngelfireUk83

Member
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Joined
Nov 7, 2004
Just wondered how many of you who have a WD Raptor drive are using it(them) in a non-RAID set-up. And if so whats the speed of your op system and other programs like. I was thinking of getting a WD Raptor 74GB for use for XP and programs and then buying a 120GB slave SATA drive for music and other stuff.

Just I've never even tried creating a RAID system sure I reckon if I purchased a RAID card and slammed it into this system below. I reckon I would see even more better performance that could meet to todays standards. I look at RAID and think it's too hard to put together and alot of messing around.
 
Actualy, Raid is really simple...IMO.
I set up my first Raid 0 array with my 2 raptors a few days ago...Simple as going into the raid controllers BIOS, and setting the array.
Only thing that might bug some people is you have to do the "F6" thing in windows setup to install.

Not trying to convince you either way, just saying its not hard and the speed is nice.
 
Raid is very simple....i agree totally! Just point to which drives you want to include and thats it. just remember, raid0 = 0 redundancy but speed is great. Raid 1 is just a mirror so no speed advantage but if one drive throws up, your data is safe. Then there is raid 5, my personal favorite but also the most expensive because you have 2 drives and then if you want redundancy, you can have a hot spare ready to take over if one drive fails out. and then you can combine 0+1 but like i said, its more $$$ for the extra drives.

Raid is not hard and imho, very nice speed boost
 
I have a similar setup to the one your looking at. If you want to see a less than 1 month old HDtach I'd be glad to bench it for you just let me know
 
I have a 74gb Raptor and a 120gb storage drive as a matter of fact. I would say it is quite speedy, but I have never had RAID to compare it to, although that will most likely be my next upgrade. I am always the first or second one to load a map while gaming, though.
 
The 150GB raptors are almost as fast as my 15K scsi drives on random accesses, though the generational difference makes the raptor faster in overall throughput. There's really no point to RAIDing any of these units, as the goal is to minimize access times, not increase contiguous transfer rates.
 
I'm on the newest Raptor now after getting rid of the older generation drives I had in RAID. The single drive is nice, but RAID0 just makes everything move faster and I'll be going back to it as soon as I can pick up another drive. You don't have to be moving large files around, etc. to notice the benefit.
 
dicecca112 said:
I have a similar setup to the one your looking at. If you want to see a less than 1 month old HDtach I'd be glad to bench it for you just let me know
Click to expand...

Yes please do I would love to see the results.
 
I have a single 74gb Raptor for my OS and programs, and several other drives for data storage.

Personally, day to day I always think 'this could be faster'. But, when I use a friend's machine with similar specs to mine, there is a big difference in loading times, which is why I got it in the first place. Worth it to me? Maybe, maybe not.
 
I have a single 36 gig raptor for OS/apps with a 120 gig storage drive and another computer with 2x74 gig raptors. I recently upgraded from 1x74 to 2x74 in RAID 0. Since it was an upgrade, I added a second 74 gig drive, but if I was building new, I would have used a single 150 gig raptor.

I have to say that while a single raptor seems a lot faster than a 7200 rpm drive, with RAID 0 raptors I did not notice a huge improvement other than benchmarks over a single raptor. Psycologically though, I feel I have the fastest setup I can afford.
Raid 0 7200 rpm drives seem just as fast as a single 36 gig raptor.
 
I have to say that while a single raptor seems a lot faster than a 7200 rpm drive, with RAID 0 raptors I did not notice a huge improvement other than benchmarks over a single raptor.
Click to expand...
Interesting. I've had the exact opposite experience and goes to show how hard it is the tell someone whether or not a Raptor will meet a person's expectations.

Psycologically though, I feel I have the fastest setup I can afford.
Click to expand...
Most definately, now if you tried the new 16MB cache drives.........
 
I have a Raptor and have seen my 16mb cache IDE Maxtor 300gb perform just barely slower ... and have seen considerably better speeds out of my 320gb Seagate 7200.10
 
Are those really that much faster?
Click to expand...
Well benchmark-wise, my new 36GB drive is about 15% faster than my older 36 and 74GB drive. That's signifgant I think for a model upgrade, but for me, going from the old to the new model made it harder to detect that improvement. I'd say going from a 7200rpm drive to the newest Raptor should be noticable. Me, I'm going back to RAID0 with another 36GB drive as I shoulda never sold off my old ones........curiousity got the best of me.
 
single raptor is fast enough and snappy enough for a day-to-day system. raid is faster for file transfers; if you constantly move hugh files around you'll see the difference. if not, using single raptor for a boot drive is an upgrade in itself over most other drives.

yah, i have a "single boot drive" raptor system :p
 
I wouldn't be moving hugh files around the only thing I do very rarley is burn a DVD but that's the only big thing I do. I don't have any games installed at the moment but I was looking at making sure my op system would have great performance. So I thought a 74gb Raptor would do the trick just sending off for my nf570 motherboard at the moment.

I can't seem to see this system below yet as I haven't got any new parts to my new system.
 
I was running a 74GB Raptor 16MB by itself before I upgraded to RAID0 Rap's, I noticed quite a bit of a difference over my 200GB WD2000JS drive. The Raptor is going to be faster over any 7200RPM drive because of it's random access time. You will notice the difference, ignore the 7200.10 posts.
 
i'd highly recommend getting a 74 gig raptor for your system drive. i've got 4 other drives for storage. raptor is for prog files, os's (windows and suse linux) and game program files. definitely notivable difference. maybe eventually i'll go to 2 raptors in a raid 0:thup: biggest difference is when your defraging/cleanup. really won't notice it too much when just opening stuff, but it's definitely nice to have less of a bottleneck.
 
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