Raptor X anxiety...

[bandit788]

1 Raptor 150 or 2 X 74 raid0? I am doing serious work next weekend (adding water) and wanted to go ahead and switch drives while I was at it. I game BF2, surf, and just do school work in Adobe and Word. I have 2 X Hitachi 80gig drives and a Maxtor 250 for backup, when I took the Hitachi's out of raid my system lost it’s “snap” (their is just a brief pause that was not there with my raid when opening stuff). When I broke my raid I also went from A8N-SLI with Winnie 3200, to A8N32-SLI with Opteron 170 (I can't imagine this upgrade would be my problem as I am clocked higher with the dual core). This is what has prompted me to get a single raptor (or raptor raid). I heard there may be a better 74 coming out soon; any advice? 150gig raptor seems to be best performing, but for performance 2 X 150gig in raid0 seems like a huge waste of space! 40-80gig for OS, programs, and a game or two would suffice (but 36gig raptors are horrible compared to newer ones). Any advice is greatly appreciated!!
Bandit

[Order]

Just the 150gB.
No 74gB, no RAID.
Trust me.

[cirthix]

meh, raptors. for the same price you could get dirt cheap sata drives and run a raid 5

[bandit788]

Hey Order, trust U? Come on, spill the beans! Anyway, I hope your right cause I just ordered one two hours ago (almost got two but I talked sense into myself; if the new 74gig "740adfd" comes out soon I might re-evalute). Thanks for the post, it eased my mind a little, but give me some inside info...do you have one? Have you seen big improvements compared to another setup?

Cirthix, aren't Raid5's pretty risky and difficult to rebuild if a drive goes down? What about performance for what we do, and don't you have to have atleast 4 drives before you start to see a big jump in performance? I don't know much but I immediatly saw this: "RAID 5 implementations suffer from poor performance when faced with a workload which includes many writes which are smaller than the capacity of a single stripe; this is because parity must be updated on each write, requiring read-modify-write sequences for both the data block and the parity block. More complex implementations often include non-volatile write back cache to reduce the performance impact of incremental parity updates".

[[XC] leviathan18]

1 150gb raptor perfoms almost the same as 2 74gb raid 0 but without the risk of loosing your data

[Order]

Here you go: :)
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_1.html

I also base it on personal experience with the drive on a few occasions. I have a 15k Fujitsu MAU on my server and the Raptor didn't feel much different.

[Nocturnal]

Where'd you hear that there will be a new 74GB version coming out?

[nn_step]

Where'd you hear that there will be a new 74GB version coming out?
Western Digital supply channels
Then almost as fast as they were available they were bought up.. :(
basically it was a limited edition..

[Order]

I'd be surprised if they were all bought up because then it would be akin to an OEM and system-integrator-only release, right? I'm guessing they will have more batches produced for retail channels.

[gr8golf]

1 150gb raptor perfoms almost the same as 2 74gb raid 0 but without the risk of loosing your data

If your single drive fails - you will lose the data just the same as if one of the striped disks in a RAID 0 set fails. Maybe what you mean is that it is more likely that one of the disks will fail if you are running two drives. That is true.

I have rebuilt my own systems lots over the last few years. Every time I reinstall Windows I try it on a single drive, because I keep hearing that a single drive is as fast as a RAID 0 set. And then I will reconfigure my array and install on two drives. It *feels* much faster to me - from the Windows install all the way through normal use loading games and large files. I'm still happy with my two 36GB Raptors - tho I am tempted to get one of the new 150's and give a shot with just the single drive. I will probably wait until one of my 36's dies tho.

[Cooper]

740ADFD is more likely to be spotted in retail in EU market. It also is in ncix (http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18013&promoid=0), but they out of stock :(
I`m also planning to buy the 74GB version, but I guess 740GD will be it, since EU has crazy prices.

[bandit788]

Western Digital supply channels
Then almost as fast as they were available they were bought up.. :(
basically it was a limited edition..

I found a recent review of them done last week (Model 740adfd), and I can't freakin find it now:eek: My brother is so mad (he wanted to see it). It was a German review that someone had linked to babelfish for translation. It pretty much said that the 150 still beat out the 74 in many of the test, but the test were the old 74 was way behind the 150, the new 74 closed the gap. I know this is 2nd hand and vague, so believe it or not because I suck and did not bookmark it (spent an hour yesterday trying to find the thread that linked to this, and could not). I still purchased the 150 even after reading this, because I researched for surely ten hours but could not find a release date. I called WD and they did verify that it was a model, and that shipment has been limited, and they did not know when it was to be released in the US. Sounds like initial R&D to me, but anyway...could not get a grasp on when we would see this, and I like the Raptor X window (don't know if the new 74 will have it?).

[Order]

Na, once you RAID, you never go back.

Raided Raptors = PURE BLISS.

I know the RAID is nice....I've played around with a system that had 12x 15k RPM SCSIs in RAID 0, heh....but the benchmarks clearly show that the single Raptor 150 beats a pair of RAIDed 74s in nearly every test.

[Forgotten_Ronin]

I'll wait for the new 74s with the 16meg cache...hopefully they'll be out soon. :)

[Delirious]

I know the RAID is nice....I've played around with a system that had 12x 15k RPM SCSIs in RAID 0, heh....but the benchmarks clearly show that the single Raptor 150 beats a pair of RAIDed 74s in nearly every test.

where? linkage please?

[gr8golf]

I know the RAID is nice....I've played around with a system that had 12x 15k RPM SCSIs in RAID 0, heh....but the benchmarks clearly show that the single Raptor 150 beats a pair of RAIDed 74s in nearly every test.

It drives me crazy that *all* the benchmarks say that RAID 0 doesn't increase performance over a single drive. I use my rig at home every day, and work on tons of other systems all day every day. There is just no comparison. I may have to buy a Raptor 150G to give another try when I go Conroe this summer.

[Delirious]

The raptor is hands down the fastest single sata drive u can get, but even two cheap 80gb drives in raid 0 are faster, not by a whole lot but theyre faster.

Two 74gb raptors in raid 0 would easily be faster than the 150gb raptor.

[nn_step]

The raptor is hands down the fastest single sata drive u can get, but even two cheap 80gb drives in raid 0 are faster, not by a whole lot but theyre faster.
only when doing certain things..
Other times no they are not...
It all depends on what you plan on doing...