18gb 15k scsi vs. 36 or 74gb raptor as boot drive?

[dustybyrd]

which do you think is faster:

18gb scsi 15,000rpm cheetah and the LSI U160 SCSI controller to be my boot drive

or a 36gb or 74gb raptor?

space is not a concern here...cost isn't a concern either...

only performance matters here...specifically in boot times of WinXP pro

 

[Vio1]

id have to say the 74gb raptor loads up windows the fastest... With scsi you have the extra scsi controller bios to go through and for some reason (at least for me) windows takes a bit longer to start up. In windows, and for apps, thats were SCSI shines.

 

[dustybyrd]

thanks...

i guess that means no for the 18gb scsi drive...which already is slower than the 74gb scsi drive...particularly in bandwidth

 

[Vio1]

what do you mean in bandwidth???

 

[dustybyrd]

what do you mean in bandwidth???

minimum, sustained and average transfer rates for the 18gb 15k cheetah are about 35-40mb/s...this isn't bad...since the minimum is 35mb/s...

but that's still slower for large transfers than either the 74gb scsi or raptor...

i'm not sure if bandwidth is the right term...but you see my point...

this is also probably why windows doesn't boot any faster with the scsi 74gb versus the raptor...both have similar average sustained transfer rates...

 

[monkeydude99387]

I would personally go for the 36gb or 74gb Hard drive since 18GB is a bit small. I believe that the Raptor is good enough.

 

[dark_15]

The cheetah will be the fastest...

15,000 RPM vs 10,000 RPM will win every time...

If cost is not a concern, buy another hard drive to store data. Install your OS and apps on the cheetah and get your movies and documents on the secondary drive.

 

[cooter]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=345748

I would recommend reading this whole post. It has comparisons about pretty much everything. for me 2 36 gb 15k rpm scsi in raid boot fastest. and that post has an idea of which is fastest once windows loads.

 

[oswald]

15k rpm scsi for sure.

or, for the overkill, get 2 x 15k rpm scsi drives and raid0 them.

faster rpm = faster access time. which in case of loading windows (a.k.a. loading a gazillion of small files) matters the most.

 

[dustybyrd]

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=345748

I would recommend reading this whole post. It has comparisons about pretty much everything. for me 2 36 gb 15k rpm scsi in raid boot fastest. and that post has an idea of which is fastest once windows loads.

I did read that post...but this is one of the pervasive themes of that post:

"My computer doesnt boot up faster, actually it takes longer then it did on the raptor... it takes 7 bars before windows opens. Ive noticed, since this harddrive has a led on it (showing harddrive activity) that it doesnt start to load up windows until the 4th bar has passed in windows load up.... before the 4th bar the harddrive is just sitting there idling. Any way of speeding up so that it starts reading the hdd faster?"

i also saw that your raided scsi 36gb 15k drives booted faster into windows...but (1) i don't have access to another reasonably priced scsi drive for raid and (2) your drives are substantially faster individually than the 18gb 15k scsi drive that's available to me...