Originally posted by: sutahz
I purchased them, and returned them many months ago. I was just relating my experience w/ raptors so anyone else in the market for them could hear from us our opininos. You have my opinion and others on this forum (mine negative, everyone else is very happy w/ theirs).
Unlike LOUISSSSS, my windows boot time was worse (i'd have to look at my benchmark records to see RAID0 vs single raptor boot times).
bob4432 seems to like them too.
Originally posted by: bob4432
you buy the raptors for the lower seek times, not the str, which can be easily beaten by many 7.2k hdds as data density is going through the roof.
As from storagereview (which a poster on here suggested I/people read):
It is important to remember that seek time and transfer rate measurements are mostly diagnostic in nature and not really measurements of "performance" per se. Assessing these two specs is quite similar to running a processor "benchmark" that confirms "yes, this processor really runs at 2.4 GHz and really does feature a 400 MHz FSB." Many additional factors combine to yield aggregate high-level hard disk performance above and beyond these two easily measured yet largely irrelevant metrics. In the end, drives, like all other PC components, should be evaluated via application-level performance. Over the next few pages, this is exactly what we will do. Read on!
some other things from storage review:
For nearly two years, however, the Raptor's flagship capacity has stubbornly stood at 74 gigabytes. As SATA drives such as Hitachi's enormous (not to mention blazingly fast) Deskstar 7K500 and Western Digital's own Caviar WD4000KD arrived, users willing to spend some change for premium SATA storage found themselves in an unusual quandary - spring for the massive 400-500 GB capacity offered by today's huge units or go for the
slight speed advantage still maintained by the Raptor while (rather ironically) saving a few bucks?
It is all too common for an enthusiast to believe that his or her usage pattern is closer to that of a server's rather than a desktop's. This idea arises from a variety of sources- "I multitask a lot," "I hear the hard drive grinding away," "I deal with lots of huge files," etc. The truth is, however, that even the heaviest, grinding multitasker experiences disk access patterns that are far more localized in nature than the truly random access that servers undergo. Individuals who choose a hard drive based on its prowess in IOMeter with the belief that their usage habits mimic a server simply do themselves a disservice. It is measures such as the SR Office and High-End DriveMarks that most accurately depict a non-server's response, whether it be the sheer speed experienced under intense disk access or the "snap and feel" associated with intermittent but bursty operations.
But yes, the Raptor is the best performing hdd. All I'm saying is the price premium (500% price increase of price/GB) for the <10% real world improvement in performance.. didn't suit me.