WD Raptor Drives

[chesterfield]

I am currently running a RAID 0 system with two 250 gig WD's SATA II. Will raptors increase the speed as some say???

Does it slow anything down if your OS is on the raptors and everything else is on SATA II drives, or, does the OS and all running programs need to be on the raptor, including the temp files for DVDShrink or CloneDVD.

Thanks.......

[aedipuss]

raptors are faster because they spin at 10,000rpm instead of the usual 7200 or 5400. they will speed up file transfer intensive work only. as in encoding form one raptor to another raptor. having just one wouldn't really do much good.

they down side is that they tend to whine really loudly. kind of a high pitched squeal.....

[ofbarea]

I have one raptor for booting up my OS, a second 250 WD drive to use a edition device an a third WD 450GB in an external USB case to capture DV.

I decided to boot from the raptor because this reduces boot time.

[rallynavvie]

No, the I/O bandwidth of a Raptor will be no different than any other SATA drive of the same tech (SATA1 or SATA2). Really the only advantage to faster rotational speed HDDs is the access and seek times are greatly reduced. This is very advantageous for servers running databases like SQL and such.

Using one as your boot can be nice since it will be able to access application files quicker if they're spread out on the platters but most good defraggers keep them clustered so you may not notice much of a difference.

And be kind to your computer: mirror that striped array if you aren't ready to lose it all. RAID 0 can be a dangerous endeavor, especially with friggin 500GB of data. Are you nuts?

[alegator]

Does 10000rpm drives degrade faster over time due to their higher spin speed? If so, does it mean that their lifetime is also shorter as compared to a 7200rpm drive?

[rallynavvie]

You would think so but I have several 15krpm SCSI drives that have vastly outlasted my 7200rpm IDE drives, though they aren't powered on and off quite as often. Part of the reason the higher RPM drives are more expensive is in part due to the build quality of the drives and the components used.

[chesterfield]

how about the WD 150 GIG Raptor X??? would using just one drive be faster than 2 250 GIG SATA II that are in RAID 0???

[rallynavvie]

The single 10krpm SATA drive will have faster access times than the array you have, as well as be 200% safer, but the array has more sustained I/O bandwidth.

The only reason you'd ever need sustained I/O bandwidth like that is to tranfer files to other arrays with similar bandwidth capabilities, so unless you have a second pair of striped drives all that bandwidth is really going to waste. The faster access times of a Raptor would probably be a better option.

Get the 150GB Raptor and use it as boot. Only install your apps on there in addition to the OS. Take those other two 250GB drives and split them up. Map one with your "My Documents" and keep your frequently used docs, music, and such on that one. Use the second 250GB drive for video scratch space: temporary space for video files while you work on them. That way you can encode from the scratch drive to the documents drive and probably even see faster read/write that way than the RAID 0.

[chesterfield]

well, i bought a 150 gig RAPTOR X and cloned my RAID 0 3/gig/sec set up and man, the one raptor smokes my previous RAID 0 setup. i may go out and get another for either storage and encoding purposes or try two in RAID 0.

newegg has them for @259, they are currently on sale at best buy for $199....