Satisfaction with Western Digital Raptor drives

[sirjinx1974]

My 2 raptor drives are wicked fast. When I changed from a 7200 to a 10,000, I noticed a big difference in performance. I will never go back to the slow 7200 drives again. I tried to load Windows onto a 7200 drive just to see the difference and I about pulled my hair out waiting for the disk to make up its mind on when to access the program I wanted to open. If I could find a store close to my home that sells 15,000 SCSI drives brand new, I would go and buy one A.S.A.P.

 

[Bad ConNecTioN]

Wee, I can't wait till I can get 15k rpm SATA drives

 

[Scott9027]

My 36 GB Raptor was not that much faster than a good 7200 RPM drive for my uses. The only thing that went considerably faster was formatting and installing Windows, which were much faster, but during day to day use I didn't notice it very much. Although I agree it's a faster drive, it just wasn't worth the cost to me.

 

[Sucka]

Had single 36, and RAID'ed 36's, had single 74's and RAID'ed 74's and i can honestly say a single 74GB Raptor is the way to go. Short of benchmarking i see no need to put a set of Raptors into a RAID 0 unless you're doing huge file transfers. But Raptors in general are great.

 

[khaotik]

Sucka, were the 74's much quieter than the 36's? I love my 36 (one without fluid bearings) but would upgrade to a 74 if seek/write noise was significantly lower.

 

[hainer36]

i got 2 36 raptors in raid 0 and i did not feel much...if any difference from my 80gb 2mb 7200 drive, and felt slower than the 200gb 8mb 7200 drive, i dont se what all the hubub (someone said that to me recently, had to work it in) is about these, i felt very little difference (performed all tests and put all games on there...did not help alot) nex time im going for a 16mb cache drive, i no tat they perform better than the raptors (borrowed friends, while he was away)

 

[Bad ConNecTioN]

Do you mind my asking what kind of controller you are using?

Because my experience was exactly the opposite. My Raided Raptors are much faster than my 16mb cache drive

 

[Paladine]

I would like to clear up a little confusion about the Raptors. 74 GB or 36 GB also have 8 MB Buffer Size. No different than your standard 7200RPM SATA 8MB Cache Hard Drive. In case anyone was confused...

Saying that;

2 X 10K ** Raptors >> 2 X 7200RPM 8 MB Cache Drives > 1 X 10K Raptor > 1 X 7200RPM 8MB Cache Drives

** Debate still out if 2 X 36 >= 2 X 74

 

[SpaceRangerJoe]

The 74 gig raptors have a new queing set that is supposed to speed up performance some over the 36gig flavor. In sustained transfers, the 74gig drives will be faster than the 36 due to higher data density.

 

[Bad ConNecTioN]

The 74gb Raptors have been proven to be faster than the 36gb...and yes, that would apply to being raided aswell. How much faster is debatable, but there is a speed differance.

 

[johan851]

would like to clear up a little confusion about the Raptors. 74 GB or 36 GB also have 8 MB Buffer Size. No different than your standard 7200RPM SATA 8MB Cache Hard Drive. In case anyone was confused...

Saying that;

2 X 10K ** Raptors >> 2 X 7200RPM 8 MB Cache Drives > 1 X 10K Raptor > 1 X 7200RPM 8MB Cache Drives

** Debate still out if 2 X 36 >= 2 X 74

Once again, that ranking system holds true in terms of transfer rates, but NOT in terms of seek times.

 

[Paladine]

Yeah? Where would it differ?

 

[Gabbiani]

I got 7ms last night on a test with HD tach... don't know how accurate that is.

 

[Quest For Speed]

I have 2 74G in Raid 0 and 1 36G and never had a problem with them. I transfer huge uncompressed DV and these drives supply all the speed I need.

 

[Audioaficionado]

When I speced parts for my Xeon duallie, I decided not to go SCSI as the single user performance of the Raptor matches or even beats the 10k SCSI drives and its more reasonablely priced. It's very good as a single and I don't feel the need to RAID it. I have the WD 7800 250GB SATA for my storage. I'd eventually like to do RAID 5 with several big drives for my future storage bank.

 

[David Coleman]

Just put in an RMA for my raptor. Emitting a high pitch squeel about 80% of the time while idling after 18 months of continuous use. Probably going to go to a 2x80GB Raid 0 array for near the same speeds and more storage space for the same money.

 

[PopRichie]

As a lot of people said the jump from a 5400 RPM to a WD 7200 RPM, 8MB Cashe was fantastic. I have 2 of these drives in different computers and they are great, been using them for over a year now. Just jumped to a Raptor 360 and I got no performance gain. If you talk about windows loading it now takes about 15 to 20 seconds longer, Part of the additional time is the PCI controller card setup screen. Am I happy? NO

 

[Rattle]

I wasnt overly impressed with the 74gb raptor I had, I think there's more cost effective solutions that end up being as fast or faster and more space also.

The 150gb drives those me actually have more of a difference because of 16mb cache and sata 3.0

 

[Misfit138]

My raptor died after a year of continuous use, so i replaced it with 2 Hitachi T7K250's in RAID 0, after reading up on them. SUpposedly the Deskstars in RAID 0 and with 3GB/s activated crush the performance of a single raptor.
All I have to say is........NOT !
The only thing that is slightly faster with the Hitachi's in RAID is Windows boot-up. Everything else is slower- game levels, OS responsiveness, defragging, software installs.
I RMA'ed the Raptor and will be going back to it.
WHile I was disappointed in the drive dying only after a year, I was very happy when WD shipped me out a replacement drive the day after they received my defective one. That alone is reason enough for me to stick with the Raptor series for a while.

 

[johan851]

That's actually the first Raptor failure I've heard of. Generally, these drives are built to server-like specifications...they should be some of the most reliable drives out there.