I am about to build a gaming rig and I can’t decide if I should get a Western Digital VelociRaptor 300Gb hard drive. Is there much improvement over the Samsung Spin Point F1 SATAII 1TB 32Mb Cache which I was going to use to run my OS on. I have seen the VelociRaptor drives for about £200 is it worth the extra money for the performance??
Definitely don't bother with the VelociRaptor drives, they are expensive and they don't offer enough of a performance increase to be worth the price. They are barely faster than the Spinpoints.
Check out WesternDigital new 32MB cache HDD's... I think they are closer to Samsung SpinPont F1... However, I did not read any official reviews on it. But you should check it out.
Get 2xF1 drives and RAID0 them. Masses of space and great performance. Of course, be sure to back up any data on them regularly.
storage isn't really want I'm after, I want to have good performance in OS and games not sure about going down the raid 0 route. Just wanted to know if there would be much difference between the spinpoint F1 and the raptor for gaming and OS
Hehe, I don't blame you. It can be more trouble than its worth. It is nice though and while many test show it doesn't make massive differences, daily use does seem much better IMO. Most reviews I've seen show the F1 beating the VR in some things and not far behind in most others. Real-world tests have them about level-pegging IIRC.
Thanks that it a great help, I think I will save the money and wait for SSD to become a more realistic option
NP If its SSD you fancy, the newer SSD drives in silly-small sizes can be had for not too much ad work great in RAID0. Particularly on decent RAID controller cards with some cache memory and fast processors.
I'd get a small SSD boot/program drive, then a larger drive for storing files (F1 for performance, 1Tb because you mentioned it before) Just a personal opinion
Problem with most current SSD drives is that they can't directly load windows on them. You almost have to load them on a traditional HDD, then mirror the image over to the SSD. The new Intel SSD drives don't have that issue, but they're also ~6x more expensive. Problem comes with how the main memory controller handles large numbers of small data IIRC.
Interesting, I thought it was an OS compatibility issue. Wait... why does the Dell Latitude E4200 which doesn't have an Intel SSD, doesn't have any problem such as what you mentioned... This laptop only has as option SSD, no HDD. I am curious for more info
get a terabyte, and if it's not fast enough (or when funds allow) get a SSD. raptors are power-hungry, noisy, and overpriced for what you get.
Sorry, no. They are not much louder than a typical drive, though a bit higher-pitched, and if you remove them from the heatsink frame the noise drops dramatically. They are also quite expensive, and while the performance is stellar, it doesn't usually jump out at you. My system with a Velociraptor might be just a bit more responsive than it was with my previous 7200rpm drive, but I don't notice it during most tasks. Every once in a while, though, it'll jump out at me like crazy; the last time I opened a video clip in Windows Movie Maker I was absolutely stunned by how quickly the scenes loaded. However, the Velociraptor is not power-hungry. The old Raptors were, but the new one uses about half as much power as a typical 7200rpm desktop drive and sometimes even a bit less than the 5400rpm GreenPower drives. Would I recommend one? Not to most people, but I'd suggest a single Velociraptor before building a RAID0 of more normal drives. It's also a cheap way to get similar-or-better performance to an SSD for most tasks, and it's large enough, unlike an SSD, that most people not engaged in piracy will have plenty of storage space.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=9 Read the whole article if you're interested.
Thank you. The Dell latitude E4200, uses Samsung SSD. and you do get a Vista (and only Vista) disk. However, if you take XP (with Vista disk upgarde), Dell only give you an image on the SSD of XP, no disk like Vista.
FWIW, on my current box I'm going to use cheap small disks in RAID for the OS, and a single 300 GB VelociRaptor for my games and personal files. Even if the RAID failsl, it will in theory only have the base OS on it which would be easily re-installed. Cheap disks in RAID will be about as fast as VelociRaptors in non RAID.
VelociRaptor will give you a great performance. you said you want a drive for your OS, then 300GB or even the 150GB one is perfect. anything larger will have to see the trouble of partitioning.
