Satisfaction with Western Digital Raptor drives

[Honest_Bob]

I moved from a 100GB 2MB cache WD to the first version of the 36GB Raptor. Pretty Nice upgrade, worth the money? Probably not for people with a budget, but for those who want the best..
I've since moved up to a 72GB, I dont see a diffrence other then the more SCSI like access sound.

 

[MaxAMD]

2x36 gigs raid 0.
It's faster, and they are not at all loud, little on the expensive side. But that's the price for speed.

 

[THunDA]

I was using 2x 80gig seagates in raid0.. recently I picked up 2x 36gig raptors from a forum member at a great price.. Im loving them.. Ive heard people say they are louder, but I cant hear them at all and my benchies went up quite a bit..

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

Finally got mine running, posted my thoughts in my first post.

 

[mattspalace]

I have two 74GB Raptors running in Raid0. When the little XP splash screen appears and the little LED bar starts to scroll across the screen.... it does that 1.5 times.

I think my max speed was 139mb/s when I tested the raid setup.

 

[johan851]

Wow. I knew RAID wasn't worth it...with my CPU at 2.4GHz it goes about 3/4 of the way.

 

[mattspalace]

Hmm.. My A64 didn't even boot this quick.. and it was at 2.6GHz.

 

[gvblake22]

Wow. I knew RAID wasn't worth it...with my CPU at 2.4GHz it goes about 3/4 of the way.

It really doesn't matter so much how many times it goes across because everyone loads and starts-up with different applications (some more than others). But still 3/4 of a pass is pretty damn quick!

 

[johan851]

It really doesn't matter so much how many times it goes across because everyone loads and starts-up with different applications

Yeah, true. I was mostly joking. Still, though, for the applications I use, RAID just isn't worth it. What kind of stuff do you do, mattspalace? Or are you just doing it for the heck of it? If I had the money to, I'd definitely do that.

 

[gvblake22]

Yeah, true. I was mostly joking. Still, though, for the applications I use, RAID just isn't worth it. What kind of stuff do you do, mattspalace? Or are you just doing it for the heck of it? If I had the money to, I'd definitely do that.

LOL, yeah, I totally fell for it
I was like, "wow, how the..."

 

[beta_mouse]

Very satisfied with move up from 120 GB Seagate 7200.7 to 74GB Raptor. I still use the 120GB for storage. Love the Raptor...faster boot, virus scans, game loads, everything. Plus all my personal stuff is on my storage drive so a clean format and install is a snap! Only pet peeve is the loud clicks it makes but I think I'll grow into it

 

[Don K]

Well, I voted for a happy transfer from WD120JB --> 74Gb Raptor due to increased overall performance.

BUT, im kinda unhappy with the write noise. Its pretty loud compared to most other drives I've tried. I even have it hooked up in the rubber grommets that came with the Sonata, but its still quite audible (and i don't think its dying on me)

 

[musawi]

Raptor made everything load up faster! Loving it!

 

[bandit390]

2x74gb raptors in raid 0. Don't know how much faster it is than 1, but my windows loads up in like 5 seconds. If i could do it over again, I would just buy one raptor.

 

[musawi]

5 seconds thats pretty fast, I hope your exaggerating!

 

[bandit390]

Well, not from the time i click the on button. When windows gets ready to start up, the bar goes across one time and boom, windows.

 

[musawi]

Mine goes across 8 times and boom. Is that weird?

 

[bandit390]

Never tried 1 raptor. I've seen regular 7200 hd's load that slow. So yes, I would say that is weird.

 

[Prodigious]

No its not necessarily wierd. I don't know why people never look at the overall picture, but it seems like everyone assumes slow hdd = long load times, fast = quick load.

While in principle thats very true, everyones setup is different, and your loading time is DRASTICALLY affected by your system settings.

For instance, I have all most nonessential services disabled, and my boot partition doesnt have much installed on it. So my system loads very fast. On the otherhand, someone could have a 4 disk raid0 and load slower than me simply because their system is cluttered.

If you load really slowly I'd check out how cluttered or messed up your windows instal is before blaming the hardrive.

 

[SnP2k]

Everything is a hell of a lot faster on 2x74 GB raptors in raid-0. Windows boots up after 1/2 of a scroll on the boot screen! Games load a lot faster, too, but the difference wasn't as great compared to the windows boot-time. Nonetheless, I am extremely happy with my raptors. They tear my old 7200 RPM WD Special Edition to pieces. Noise? What noise?