VelociRaptors and daily usage

[George P Burdell]

On my computer, my OS (Vista x64, Core i7, 3GB RAM) and applications occupy ~70GB on a 250GB 7200rpm drive. My media and STEAM games are spread out across other drives.

I read a few reviews about the VelociRaptor, but I'd appreciate some feedback from anyone who currently uses it. Is there a noticeable difference in speed in mundane day-to-day activities? What kind of improvement, if any, do you observe in boot-up time, application load time, and general Vista responsiveness? Is it worth replacing my 250GB OS drive with a VelociRaptor?

 

[DratHome]

I went from a 500GB Samsung to a 300GB VR and the difference isn't really that huge. Opening Opera with many tabs from last session is faster, boot up shorter, etc. Everything a bit faster overall, but nothing to make you say wow.

One thing i've noticed is using any other pc besides this one feels super slow though ;D

 

[alcoholbob]

Better access times, quicker random reads and writes.

In general it's about 10-15% faster than a 7200rpm drive. Really depends if that's enough of a difference for you.

Alternatively you could get an SSD, but the tradeoff is a much smaller drive.

 

[faxon]

i went from a 500gb seagate 7200.10 drive. the sequential speeds are 3x faster, to the point that copying data to elsewhere in the system is limited by the fact that all my other drives are 7200.10s and benchmark within 2% of each other. random read/writes are also considerably faster, and the drives seek time is half that of my other drives. the only gripe i have is i didnt get the 300gb model, and i have a game which takes up nearly 40gb of the 140gb formatted. i dont let my drives go past 75% full, because after that noticed performance drops significantly when interacting with any data within that last 25% due to where it's located on the platters. i'm already at that limit, so im stuck uninstalling any games after i play them through, which sucks when you only have room left for 1 game you can install/uninstall after all the other ones you dont want to get rid of. the performance is so worth it though. get a 300gb drive and you will be a happy camper. what i will probably do is just get a 300gb drive at some point and just start installing apps to it. i dont like using RAID0 drives since it increases seek latency, which is the biggest limiting factor in 2/3 of the drive activity i am likely to notice. if i were to get an SSD that may change, but for now a single fast drive is my best recommendation, and i can definitely recommend you the velociraptor, especially since your 250gb drive is probably at most as fast as my 3 7200.10 drives (2x400gb and 1 500gb).

 

[F1shF4t]

Got a VRaptor a couple of months ago to replace my Raid0 array of older 74 gig raptors, it performs better than the raid array up to the about the 75% point. The absolute best part of the upgrade is the lack of loud grinding noise that the older raptors made when seeking .
I only install OS and programs on it, games are on separate drive which just has a fast linear read speed.

Been using raptors for boot drives for years now and while boot times are not as important to me now (use sleep mode) the general responsiveness of the comp is great. Other machines with 7200rpm drives just feel a lot slower and less responsive (spec wise fairly close quads or triple core and 4gig+ ram)

 

[ncage]

Well hopefully if your going to buy one this deal makes it a little more tempting that i just posted:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2302356&enterthread=y

I have been thinking for about 2 weeks between a VR and a SSD. I decided to go the VR route (don't think i will go with an SSD until i know they are reliable and they drop a little in price)

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: George P Burdell
On my computer, my OS (Vista x64, Core i7, 3GB RAM) and applications occupy ~70GB on a 250GB 7200rpm drive. My media and STEAM games are spread out across other drives.

I read a few reviews about the VelociRaptor, but I'd appreciate some feedback from anyone who currently uses it. Is there a noticeable difference in speed in mundane day-to-day activities? What kind of improvement, if any, do you observe in boot-up time, application load time, and general Vista responsiveness? Is it worth replacing my 250GB OS drive with a VelociRaptor?

General responsiveness is the best benefit IMO. There is no amount of multi-tasking that seems to slow it down. Editing video is nice and snappy too. I just use Vista's built-in Movie Maker software, so everything gets stored and edited from the C drive. Application loading is quicker after a reboot, but I don't reboot much so this isn't a huge deal to me.

Another couple of things worth considering are that the drive is dead silent in operation, and doesn't generate much heat above ambient temperature.

Overall, there isn't a huge difference between the Velociraptor 300GB and say a Seagate 7200.12 series drive for games. I personally use a 500GB 7200.12 drive to store all my games, since the sequential reads are actually higher for the 7200.12 and the price was ~30% of the cost of getting another Velociraptor at the time.

 

[alcoholbob]

http://images.anandtech.com/gr...090808151933/17331.png

The Raptor is actually pretty impressive of a gaming drive if you look at this Anand Crysis Bench. This like likely due to the large environments in Crysis which benefits from high random read performance.

 

[Zapper48]

(Hugging my 2x300gb VelociRaptors in RAIDO):beer:

 

[alcoholbob]

*click click click click click*