Why ? Hdd Performance

[dopefishzzz]

Everywhere I see those review BASHING the Raptor's hard drive...

I have 3 hard drives in my computer. 2 SATA 74 HB Raptor, and 1 300GB Maxline III 300GB 16mb Cache Hard Drive.

I tried MANY times installing XP on the Maxtor Drive, because every freaking review I read told us the 7200rpm hard drives where AS FAST as the raptors. So I tough I would be better sellings those raptors...

But whenever I use XP on the maxtor hard drive, everything seems so slow ! I mean... not booting XP, not loading MAPS in half life 2, just USING windows seems faster. Opening menus, loading Word ... simple operatiions ...

could this be due ONLY to the raptor's faster seek time ??? (4.5ms VS 9ms) ?!?

Why does it seems faster, and why can't it be proven with benches ?

 

[Melchior]

It is seek time. But then again it is seek time thats actually important for everyday usage.

 

[Twsmit]

It is faster in some things....

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2396&p=6


But for most people the cost is too high to justify the speed increase. Also in many instances modern 7200RPM drives are as fast, nearly as fast, or faster than raptors.

 

[imported_Kensai]

7200RPM drives are low cost and cost-effective. 10K RPM drives are high performaning but they're out of reach of quite a fair bit of the population. Of course if you're really buff you could get 15K SCSI drives. They've got some very nice speed and will load up anything you could think of *very* quickly.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Raptors are overrated. Rewind to 1 yr ago and they were awesome. Ever since the MaxLine III came along, those are damn fast.

I know you can pull a lot of benchmarks to show otherwise, but the important thing is REAL WORLD performance not synthetic tests.

Real World tests show the MaxLine winning in the Doom III test, and not too far behind for many other things. Thus, I conclude that Raptors are not worth it. Worth it as in $$ for performance. But still, even for me, it's hard to resist buying them..... YUMMMM DUAL RAPTORS.

 

[SGtheArtist]

I picked up a Seagate X15 a couple years ago and while it has a quicker response time and faster load time than my 7200rpm HDDs I believe the cost is too high to justify the investment. And the difference between a 10000rpm and 7200rpm is too small to justify the cost.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[Arcanedeath]

The 74GB Raptor baring 1 or 2 of the latest 15K scsi drives is THE fastest desktop hard drive money can buy, If all you care about is STR then any old 7200rpm 8meg buffer HDD will put up good numbers these days (some like the Maxline III are even close to the raptor) but if you want your system to feel responsive and if seek times are important for your apps (pretty much any office task and basic windows usage) then the raptor is a far better choice than any 7200rpm drive not factoring in cost.

 

[imported_Tick]

You think 15k hd's are fast? Try a SSD. Blow your fvcking mind! Fast as a water elemental out of hell.

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: DLeRium
Raptors are overrated. Rewind to 1 yr ago and they were awesome. Ever since the MaxLine III came along, those are damn fast.

I know you can pull a lot of benchmarks to show otherwise, but the important thing is REAL WORLD performance not synthetic tests.

Real World tests show the MaxLine winning in the Doom III test, and not too far behind for many other things. Thus, I conclude that Raptors are not worth it. Worth it as in $$ for performance. But still, even for me, it's hard to resist buying them..... YUMMMM DUAL RAPTORS.

SSD's are SO much better. Raided 15k SCSI drives aren't as good as SSD's. God I love SSD's.

 

[elkinm]

Originally posted by: Tick
You think 15k hd's are fast? Try a SSD. Blow your fvcking mind! Fast as a water elemental out of hell.

Where can I get my hands on one of those with nice storage and at a good price?

 

[aatf510]

Originally posted by: dopefishzzz
Everywhere I see those review BASHING the Raptor's hard drive...

I have 3 hard drives in my computer. 2 SATA 74 HB Raptor, and 1 300GB Maxline III 300GB 16mb Cache Hard Drive.

I tried MANY times installing XP on the Maxtor Drive, because every freaking review I read told us the 7200rpm hard drives where AS FAST as the raptors. So I tough I would be better sellings those raptors...

But whenever I use XP on the maxtor hard drive, everything seems so slow ! I mean... not booting XP, not loading MAPS in half life 2, just USING windows seems faster. Opening menus, loading Word ... simple operatiions ...

could this be due ONLY to the raptor's faster seek time ??? (4.5ms VS 9ms) ?!?

Why does it seems faster, and why can't it be proven with benches ?

The raptors have bad price performance but better computing performance.

 

[Lysawy]

Nice os drive thats all i can say about a raptor ....


fast and kinda noisy compered to others

 

[imported_asfd]

from my experience, raptor is much faster than old ide (pata) drive. But just so so compared with recent sata drive. Plus raptor is way too NOISY, I would rather keep a quiet samsung sata than the raptor for silence tradeoff.

 

[Promethply]

For regular desktop use, booting, loading, etc, the Raptor74 is faster and a little bit quiter than the Maxtor MaXLineIII,

but most people feel that the Raptor74's price too steep.

Here's a link comparing real life performance of these two:

Western Digital Raptor WD740GD vs Maxtor MaXLine III (300 GB SATA)

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: elkinm

Originally posted by: Tick
You think 15k hd's are fast? Try a SSD. Blow your fvcking mind! Fast as a water elemental out of hell.

Where can I get my hands on one of those with nice storage and at a good price?

5 gb will cost around $3500.

 

[imported_Tick]

Now, I'm willing to bet your entire computer costs less than that. And by the way, $3500 for a 5 gb drive IS a good price.

 

[imported_rod]

Raptors are better than 7200rpm drives, but they are so much more expensive. And if you have a decent amount of RAM, the benefits are reduced because your HDD is accessed less. I don't see the real advantage anyway. My system seems to load anything except games almost instantly anyway. And Doom3 still loads in 5-10 seconds.

For most people, there's just no way to justify the expense. Plus, you need at least a few of them to get a decent amount of storage space.

RoD

 

[imported_Tick]

Originally posted by: rod
Raptors are better than 7200rpm drives, but they are so much more expensive. And if you have a decent amount of RAM, the benefits are reduced because your HDD is accessed less. I don't see the real advantage anyway. My system seems to load anything except games almost instantly anyway. And Doom3 still loads in 5-10 seconds.

For most people, there's just no way to justify the expense. Plus, you need at least a few of them to get a decent amount of storage space.

RoD

It's really a matter of how much the cost of a raptor means to you. If you make 100k a year, then buy a raptor. If you make 40k, maybe not. But raptors really do have a significant preformance boost. Is it worth the cost? Well, that's for each and every potentail user to decide for themselves.

/thread.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Originally posted by: DLeRium
Raptors are overrated. Rewind to 1 yr ago and they were awesome. Ever since the MaxLine III came along, those are damn fast.

I know you can pull a lot of benchmarks to show otherwise, but the important thing is REAL WORLD performance not synthetic tests.

Real World tests show the MaxLine winning in the Doom III test, and not too far behind for many other things. Thus, I conclude that Raptors are not worth it. Worth it as in $$ for performance. But still, even for me, it's hard to resist buying them..... YUMMMM DUAL RAPTORS.

You guys have to realise though, the benchmarks are TOO fair
The gaming benchmark were done after defragment. How many users would defrag their HDD everytime they install a game?

Raptors is praised for its access time. For non-degragged usage and loading apps, it would definitely run noticeably faster than even MaxLine.

Also you pay extra not only for its performance; Raptor boosts industrial standard MTBF reliability and 5 year warranty; Which I think is justified

 

[Pr0d1gy]

No doubt, defragging every week is annoying. I love my Raptor & have never had to defrag it to help performance...lol

-btw, if you need more than say 40gb of storage you should probably look at a different drive. I just happen to use this computer for gaming & surfing only.

 

[SGtheArtist]

Tick, SSD (Solid State Disk?) are nice, but as you pointed out they cost an ungoddly amount of money.

PS I've never tried one unfortunately.

 

[imported_Tick]

But they are SO FREAKIN COOL. I have only had limited use of a very-out-of-date on, but my god they are fast. Furthermore, there price-to-preformance is actually very good, however, both there price and there preformance are huge.

And yes, SSD does stand for Solid State Disk.

 

[bob4432]

i defrag all 3 of my drives in my main machine atleast 1/week, my server and wifes machine have diskeeper set to automatically defrag whenever necessary. my system drive is a 36GB u320 10krpm scsi drive and it is quite nice, and yes when i get an extra $200 i will upgrade to the latest gen 36GB 15krpm u320scsi drive, just a personal preference.

 

[Pariah]

Why does it seems faster, and why can't it be proven with benches ?

Because it really is faster for those tasks, but there is no way to benchmark system responsiveness. It's for the same reason that many people believe hyperthreaded P4's "feel" faster for everyday use than better benchmarking A64's. You can't sit there with a stopwatch and time a menu opening for a hard drive, or task switching for a P4, but you can still perceive the speed difference. And for the most part it isn't a placebo effect but a legitimate speed increase that can easily be explained by the legitimately faster access time that obviously will allow it to access data faster. This is rarely reflected in benchmarks beause the vast majority of benchmarks are some form of data streaming from a perfectly defragged drive, where access time has little to no effect. The STR advantage of a Raptor to current generation 7200 is very modest and doesn't really give it any real advantage in single large file transfers or sequential reads like game loding, especially vs today's 300+ GB drives which sometimes have higher STR than the Raptor at the same capacity point of the drives.

Benchmarks don't always tell the whole story, they only give a snapshot of the exact task they are measuring. Depending on your usage patterns a Raptor could be about even with today's 7200RPM drives or it could be significantly ahead. Regardless of what the benchmarks show, on a typical system that isn't defragged daily, the Raptor will provide a more responsive system.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

Originally posted by: Pariah

Why does it seems faster, and why can't it be proven with benches ?

Because it really is faster for those tasks, but there is no way to benchmark system responsiveness. It's for the same reason that many people believe hyperthreaded P4's "feel" faster for everyday use than better benchmarking A64's. You can't sit there with a stopwatch and time a menu opening for a hard drive, or task switching for a P4, but you can still perceive the speed difference. And for the most part it isn't a placebo effect but a legitimate speed increase that can easily be explained by the legitimately faster access time that obviously will allow it to access data faster. This is rarely reflected in benchmarks beause the vast majority of benchmarks are some form of data streaming from a perfectly defragged drive, where access time has little to no effect. The STR advantage of a Raptor to current generation 7200 is very modest and doesn't really give it any real advantage in single large file transfers or sequential reads like game loding, especially vs today's 300+ GB drives which sometimes have higher STR than the Raptor at the same capacity point of the drives.

Benchmarks don't always tell the whole story, they only give a snapshot of the exact task they are measuring. Depending on your usage patterns a Raptor could be about even with today's 7200RPM drives or it could be significantly ahead. Regardless of what the benchmarks show, on a typical system that isn't defragged daily, the Raptor will provide a more responsive system.

I say half of it is psychological. Of course benchmarks can do something. If you're talking about synthetic benchmarks like 3d Mark or Sandra, yea sure they're not that great.

You can still bench loading times, etc. That's the real world stuff that counts. And this is why I emphasize that the MaxLine III can come pretty close and beat the Raptor in some cases when we speak about REAL WORLD performance. Thus, while the Raptor's 10k RPM gives it superior synthetic benches, I bet if you were able to run the MaxLine III at 10k, it would win in an instant.