How fast is a WD Raptor?

I think the main advantage of the raptors is supposed to be the seek times... I cant remember exactly but I think the 74gb ones are supposed to be 4.5ms? And normal SATA drives are 9ms... Also one 74gb raptor is supposed to be similar in performance to 2x 36gb raptors in RAID 0, however going to 2x 74gb raptors in RAID 0 doesnt give a lot of a performance increase.

I still the think the best drives on the market are the Maxtor Maxline IIIs, 300GB 16MB cache Native Command Queing and SATAII (if your SATA controller supports NCQ and SATAII) with performance around that of a 74GB Raptor all for less than $1 a GB is pretty good...

i bought one about 6 months ago, definatly pricey, but it'l last, and its new technology, i notice some difference in performance compared to my 7200 8mb 80 gig WD, its nice and clean though. i have all my programs on the raptor, and most files on 7200 80 gig WD. plus i went onto the WD site to see what the specs are, i was worried at first it was going fry being on 24/7 at 10,000 rpm, but the site list expeted lifetime in hours and i converted it and it comes out to some exotic time of like 20-30 years. i also have an antec HD cooler cooling it.

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Originally Posted by Behemth Daemon

I have a Maxtor 7200RPM, and I need to know if getting a WD Raptor would make that much difference in gaming or not.

Thanks!

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It will improve load times, but you won't notice any FPS difference.


As for the whole raid debate - I thought the main plus side of a raptor was it's super low access times which makes a huge difference when dealing with small files. Two cheap drives in raid0 can never compete with these access times. Transfer rates aren't everything. I have lost over 100GB of data due to raid0 in the past and didn't notice the difference in performance, I now avoid it at all costs :)

the physical drive itself may have no advantage but the bus can handle more data and therefore they perform a little better. another advantage to SATA is that there is no master/slave settings becuase each drive has its own controller and cable so you can be writing data to all of your SATA drives at the same time while u would have to alternate which drive you write to on an IDE Chain

Here is 36.7 on the New VIA KT880 single drive.
Link1

DFI UT 250 36.7 on Sata 3#
link2


Controlers can make a huge difference also, out of the promis,Nvidia,VIA onboard solutions . the VIA has proven to be the fastest for me.
Here is a WD special edition link3


hope I have the links sorted out!!

yes ive heard that lot too, the controllers make a big differnce weather they be in a controller outside or built into the motherboard.