Considering buying a Raptor...

[TronX]

The raptor is cool.. I wish it was bigger though.
But for 145$ it's cheaper than buying a 36GB scsi
and controller card.

 

[Viper96720]

Yes and no big cable either

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: BG4533
I currently have a Raptor and A7N8X Deluxe and am considering getting a second for RAID 0. So far, I love this setup. BIOS 1005 with the .29 drivers has all of the corruption and performance issues solved. In PCmark2002 I got around 1400 with a fresh install of windows and on Sandra 42MB/s. Those have dropped to around 1300 and 37mps after using windows a bit. Everything is so much faster than my 60GB deskstar 60GXP and 2 60GXPs in RAID1.

Buy the 2nd one and try out techfuzz's RAID 1 theory... and if you don't want it after you get the results, I'll buy the drive from you.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: TronX
The raptor is cool.. I wish it was bigger though.
But for 145$ it's cheaper than buying a 36GB scsi
and controller card.

Doesn't need to be bigger... the concept behind it is that it's blazingly fast. It's not to store porn and music on. And anyone who has more than 36 GB of programs that they use on a daily basis can most likely afford a 2nd one.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: techfuzz
RAID 1 - Write performance can decrease compared to a single drive because the data must be written twice and confirmed, thus the slowest link is the slowest drive to write the data.
- Read performance can increase compared to a single drive because the data can be read from whichever drive can access it and return it the fastest.

Now if I'm using 2x Raptors as my boot drive (w/ RAID 1) which are typically used in my computers for booting and loading of programs, not the writing of data, I would expect that my boot time would be less than someone using a single Raptor. The only way we're going to solve this is with some true imperical data, ie. benchmarks, to prove who's right or wrong. Unfortunately since I'm currently paying off my last vacation and saving to buy an engagement ring it isn't going to me who does the benchmarking. I did a little searching tonight, but I couldn't come up with anything that compares boot times and RAID levels.

Cheers,
techfuzz

<a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/single.htm">Random Read Performance: Good. Better than a single drive but worse than many other RAID levels.
Sequential Read Performance: Fair; about the same as a single drive.</a>

Shortcomings are it halves the actual capacity of the HDD, and provides no improvement in speed.

<a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-2.html">You can already see that there's no speed benefit here on account of the absence of striping.
a read transaction can theoretically occur twice as fast as on single disk. Hence RAID 1 is often used on low-end web servers. The read performance is standard, if not better than single disk performance
In a nutshell, folks turn to RAID 1 when data integrity is at much more of a premium than I/O performance.</a>

The performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive

So the moral of the story is... RAID 1 is a little faster than a single drive ONLY when reading. RAID 1 is slower than a single drive when writing.

So I guess my question now is, why are you excited about the speed of RAID 1? If you're looking for speed, shouldn't you be looking at a RAID 0 array?

 

[vetteguy]

I just built my new Canterwood system this weekend, featuring 2 Raptors in RAID 0. The very first thing that happened when I was working with the Raptors (other than multiple blue screens and other crap) was the SATA connector breaking off of the Raptor when I unplugged it. For those who haven't seen them, SATA connectors are NOT very sturdy. They wiggle when they are plugged into the drive. I pulled it out of the Raptor to move the drive, and it ripped the connector right out of the drive. I don't consider that to be very "enterprise" worthy. :disgust:

 

[beatle]

I just got my raptor running on my NF7-S. This thing rips through boot-up, installations, and my favorite: multiplexing video. I've been waiting for a harddrive this size to come through with such great performance at a price that doesn't break the bank. It's also amazingly quiet. Its seeks are actually quieter than my Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9. It does have a tiny, very high pitched whine to it, but after a few hours of use, the drive has either "broken in" or my ears have. I don't notice it anymore.

 

[Compddd]

haha beatle same thing with me, I purchased and setup my 2 raptors in raid 0 today and they are quieter in reading/writing then my maxtor diamondmax 9 was.

 

[GnomeCop]

I've owned mine for quite awhile now and read write is clearly audible but that I dont mind.
The high pitched sound actually went away, I amazed. usually with WD drives it creeps up on you. I should know too because I had 2 120GB SE drives that were like banshees

 

[Compddd]

I had a 120 SE WD too that went banshee

 

[pelikan]

My 40GB SE just started making normal but loud hdd sounds. It was pretty much silent before, except for a high-pitched noise that I was able to cure by decoupling it from my case. I called WD and they gave me an RMA just for the noise even though the drive functions perfectly. My new hdd is sitting here. I used the advance ship RMA service.

 

[IoWnZa]

I am going to get a Raptor and then get a 200GB SE Drive for storage and backup. That way youve got both speed and storage.

NJRM

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: IoWnZa
I am going to get a Raptor and then get a 200GB SE Drive for storage and backup. That way youve got both speed and storage.

NJRM

That's really the best plan at this point.

Thorin

 

[jdogg707]

I just got a pair of Raptors to hook up to the ICH5R on my Abit IC7 in Raid 0. I must tell you that these baby's fly...my drive index on Sandra 2003 is 67953 with a 16K strip! Everything seems noticeably faster too, so it's not just Benchmarks that are giving me the extra points! I put Windows XP and my programs on the Raptors, and have my Western Digital 120GB Special Edition for Music, Storage and a nice fat Ghost image just in case something goes wrong! I'm loving it right now!