Velociraptor?

[ncage]

Ok guys looking into a velociraptor 300GB. Its so hard researching this topic on google because you see about 50/50 reports of people saying they really don't make much difference at all on performance and then others say its like night and day. I'm not really concerned about load times of windows. Windows loads fast enough now. I use Visual Studio 2008 and VMWare extensively and both are very hard drive intensive. Visual Studio is just a hog on the hard drive. Ive heard certain people say their system just seemed a whole lot snappier with a velociraptor. I'm not interested at this point in SSDs. They are to expensive and i want to wait for SSDs to mature anyways. So do you think a velociraptor would make that much difference over say a WD Black?

Yes i could go and read review/benchmarks but benchmarks don't in a lot of cases, equate to real world performance improvements.

thanks,
Ncage

 

[Krynj]

Yes. There's a pretty good sized difference. Take a look at this here. It's a benchmark I ran on a 1TB Green, 1TB Black, and a 300GB VelociRaptor.

-Green
-Black
-VelociRaptor
http://i23.photobucket.com/alb...bench.png?t=1236833418

Faster drives will be most noticeable once a Windows install becomes old, and has a cluttered registry. Computers are always quick and snappy when you build them, but after a few months, you notice they don't run like they used to. At this point, the effects of OS rot will become less noticeable with a faster HDD.

 

[ncage]

I keep going back and forth and trying to decide if its really worth $200 (the performance i will see)

 

[TidusZ]

I can't say exactly how much faster it is than a WD black despite owning both, simply because I use them seperately and I have never been w/o the velociraptor in this system. Crysis load times are 100x better on this rig than my c2d @3.15 though, and I imagine the hdd plays a big role there. I don't think it's the best place necessarily to put money into a computer unless you're already pretty solid everywhere else. If you could spend that $200 meaningfully on a better videocard or processor you'll likely get more out of those, but otherwise you wouldn't be throwing your money away either. If all else fails, its a pretty big epeen boost to have a velociraptor.

http://i17.photobucket.com/alb...56/tidus1492/Crown.jpg

 

[wjgollatz]

I am not an expert on hard disc drives. But I know just a tiny bit amount of RAID. Raid setups should also make your memory access and writing faster. You could buy some 500Gb discs, and would need a RAID controller, and probably save some money. It should be something to look into. There are RAID controller cards for PCI and PCI Express.

 

[fyleow]

..

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: ncage
I keep going back and forth and trying to decide if its really worth $200 (the performance i will see)

You'll see $198.27 performance bump.

 

[faxon]

i personally love having my velociraptor. when i first got it, it wasnt even my system drive, i just had everquest2 installed on it. i timed my load times with a stopwatch several times at different points of gameplay, and i did notice a significant gain in several areas. the biggest issue prior was not having enough ram a lot of the time, so NPCs (non player characters you can talk to and interact with, merchants, ect...) didnt always appear when they should have, and i sometimes ended up waiting up to 5 minutes for them to pop up loading the game off of a 500GB Seagate 7200.11 drive. popped in the VR, copied EQ2, the npc loading problem didnt go away, but i only had to wait a couple seconds every time if they didnt pop up right away, not to mention gameplay as a whole was in fact a bit smoother, since i was constantly drive thrashing for pagefile space as i moved through the game. now, im using it in a multipartition setup with the OS on a 40GB partition, and all my games on a separate partition taking up the rest of the space on my 150GB drive, along with a 3.2GHz e5200 and 6GB of ram. the performance gains were enough that since im actually starting to run out of space on this one drive, that im looking into picking up a 300GB version and sticking it in a new comp as soon as i have the money to build a quad core rig (probably i7) from the ground up, assuming i cant get an i7 enthusiast board with integrated SAS and a Seagate Cheetah for not much more by then

 

[ElBurro]

A Raptor will speed things up in certain situations. But it won't make your system 3X faster. If your budget is limited then I would say don't do it. Especially since you can get a much bigger HDD for less money which will also be pretty fast.

 

[Blain]

If you're a real man, you'll have to get a VelociRaptor.
Just think about the name... V*E*L*O*C*I*R*A*P*T*O*R :thumbsup::laugh:

 

[Elias824]

so veloci raptor v.s SSD drive? I know the size wont be close to the raptor, but how dose the performance compare?

 

[rarebear]

Here are some Benchmarks about going 2x WD Raid vs 1 Velociraptor

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...t_key=y&keyword1=raid+

Mine, running to WD 1TB Blacks and a Raptor post saying its just as fast or faster


http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3303

Raptor Bench Marks @anandtech

 

[ElBurro]

Originally posted by: Elias824
so veloci raptor v.s SSD drive? I know the size wont be close to the raptor, but how dose the performance compare?

Depends on which SSD you're talking about. Some just won't stack up at all. Most will be worst in writing performance. All will be superior in seek time.

 

[Zapper48]

I love my 300gb Vraptors in RAIDO:beer:

 

[PercocetPenguin]

I'm just going to say this.
I have a 10k RPM 160gb velociraptor.
My room mate has a 7200rpm standard WD harddrive in his laptop.
Every time a map loads in any game we play, he loads the map faster than me.
In war3 map loading starts at the same time for all computers, his always beats mine. >.<

 

[Krynj]

Originally posted by: PercocetPenguin
I'm just going to say this.
I have a 10k RPM 160gb velociraptor.
My room mate has a 7200rpm standard WD harddrive in his laptop.
Every time a map loads in any game we play, he loads the map faster than me.
In war3 map loading starts at the same time for all computers, his always beats mine. >.<

There are other factors involved, you know.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: FetusCakeMix

Originally posted by: PercocetPenguin
I'm just going to say this.
I have a 10k RPM 160gb velociraptor.
My room mate has a 7200rpm standard WD harddrive in his laptop.
Every time a map loads in any game we play, he loads the map faster than me.
In war3 map loading starts at the same time for all computers, his always beats mine. >.<

There are other factors involved, you know.

He should if he's read any threads here at the AnandTech forums.

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: ncage
I keep going back and forth and trying to decide if its really worth $200 (the performance i will see)

I had a similar dilemma and decided against it; just did not make sense when for the same money you can have 5x the storage space running faster - (4) 7200.12 500GB segate drives running RAID0 would smoke the raptor in everything but random access times. (albeit with less reliability)

 

[TC91]

Originally posted by: sgrinavi

Originally posted by: ncage
I keep going back and forth and trying to decide if its really worth $200 (the performance i will see)

I had a similar dilemma and decided against it; just did not make sense when for the same money you can have 5x the storage space running faster - (4) 7200.12 500GB segate drives running RAID0 would smoke the raptor in everything but random access times. (albeit with less reliability)

If say you short stroked that raid 0 setup to say about 200-300gb total space, would that make up for the slower access times, or is it just not possible for 7200rpm drives to make up for their slower rpms?

 

[Jumpem]

The real question is old 74GB Raptor versus the new Velociraptor?

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Jumpem
The real question is old 74GB Raptor versus the new Velociraptor?

Why is that the "real question"?
The newer VelociRaptor trumps the older Raptor in every way.

 

[sgrinavi]

Originally posted by: TC91

If say you short stroked that raid 0 setup to say about 200-300gb total space, would that make up for the slower access times, or is it just not possible for 7200rpm drives to make up for their slower rpms?

I just setup my 3x RAID 0 with the "old" WD640AAKS - it smokes average 280.8 MB/sec . It is short stroked to 640 MB - not all that short LOL. Bet you that four of those 7200.12's, short stroked to even 500GB would be up well over 300 MB/SEC . How fast is a single velociraptor? Looks like average around 100 MB/sec

 

[Jumpem]

Originally posted by: Blain
Why is that the "real question"?
The newer VelociRaptor trumps the older Raptor in every way.

I meant is it worth upgrading from a Raptor to Velociraptor.

 

[Blain]

If you need more speed, capacity and have the funds...

 

[SpunkyJones]

My 37.5 GB Raptor array died last night, time to move up to the Velociraptor!