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I keep hearing that the 10K Raptor is the way to go for a fast hard drive. However most of the SATA Raptors I see are 1.5 Gb/s not 3.0 SATA. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

I want to replace the 80Gb boot drive on my main workstation with something as fast as possible to improve OS performance. Size is unimportant. The only thing on it is my OS and apps, everything else (games, data, etc) is on a 2nd 300Gb drive. 80Gb is more than enough. Right now there's only around 10Gb on that drive.

What you guys recommend? Not interested in RAID striping. Just want the fastest single drive that won't break the bank. I've never been into the performance hard drives so I'm not up on this.

Thanks.

Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000BLFS

http://www.storagereview.com/WD3000BLFS.sr

Yeah, nice drive, but at $300 a bit pricey. I could probably rationalize up to $200.

Any other suggestions? I'm seeing 74Gb SATA Raptors for around $150 on NewEgg but they're all SATA 1.5

Looking at this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136033

Basically this is the 74Gb version of the drives Trench has in his wishlist. Seek times and avg latency are half of my existing WD800JD drive so this sounds like way to go.

I run the raptor 150GB which I believe is captioned in that round up. There are some fast drives in that article so perhaps pick one that meets your price point / interface needs. SAS / SCSI is not practical for non enterprise users. I have a 1TB Hitatchi that are pretty damn fast for the size but are pretty big. I'd stay away from the GP drives from WD as the spin down after periods of inactivity and are a bit slow in waking up and getting going. Nice storage drives but as a main drive i'd go with non-GP drives.

I don;t have any figures for you, but if you have ever loaded windows on a system with a raptor, it will amaze you. The first time I did , I was in shock. Loads windows in a just a few minutes.

FlyingPenguin wrote:However most of the SATA Raptors I see are 1.5 Gb/s not 3.0 SATA. Doesn't that defeat the purpose?

no hard disk on earth goes 3.0gb, thats 375 megabytes per second
1.5 is 187 megabytes per second, thats also not doable right now

I have a Raptor 75gig as my boot drive with my system I built in December of last year. I believe I paid around $150 for it at Fry's. Drive seems pretty fast to me compared to my 500gig SATA2 Seagate.

If you want, I can run HD Tach and tell you the difference when I get home this evening.

The Velociraptors will probably drop in a year if you can wait. Otherwise, just go RAID. I been using a Raptor & though fast, isn't incredibly noticable compared to most of the 32meg cache drives out there.

Ran a test with HD Tach on both of my drives (quick test):
Drive 1: Raptor 75gig: 134.1 mb/s
Drive 2: Seagate 500gig: 128.8 mb/s
The Seagate is SATA2 and the Raptor is SATA1, and both are setup using AHCI in the bios.

The Raptor is the way to go for performance drives, but the benefits are marginal at best. You are sacrificing storage for a small boost in speed, both ending up around the same cost if not the Raptor a little more. Best to stripe a couple of 32mb cache drives from Seagate, or stick with one. A 250gig can be had from Newegg for $80. It can even beat the Raptor in a few benchmarks.

Heh. Bought a used 74Gb Raptor from a friend for $50. BAM!!!

For that price what the hell.

I'll do a boot time comparison before and after.

Boots a bit quicker - something like 45 seconds faster. However since this PC is on 24/7 that doesn't mean much. Subjectively the desktop does feel more responsive.

What's really noticeable is the time it takes to image the drive with Acronis. Used to take 7 minutes to image my boot drive. Now it takes 3 minutes.

The drive IS noisier though. You can hear the head armature which is all but silent on a standard drive. Not real bad though.

I run the 36GB raptor on my boot drive.

decent drive.. I got it for nothing..

Yeah, they sound like the drives from the 2gb days. I was really suprised to hear the seek sound the first time. I noticed a difference, but in the end, I went for space/cost (sold the drive to a friend for full pop, because he was building a new computer & I only had a few hours use on it). Though the speeds & size of the Velociraptors is keeping me watching for a dip in price. Unless I can get me a 64gb solid state drive.