hard drives should I bother with raptor?
 

Should I pickedup a pair of $100 640Gb WD drives or the 150Gb raptor drives are in the $175 range and the new 300Gb velociraptor drives are in the $300 range.

Looking around at a few of my old favorite review sites the 640Gb WD isn't all THAT far behind in single drive tests but by time I put it into a RAID I should at least match it in performance and still have over 1Tb of super fast storage. all for ~$200 I know there's plenty of anti-RAID people here but this would mainly be for a linux installation which I keep backups of all important data elsewhere anyway. I have an automated system I put together that sends them to my web server and a local storage drive so the issues of a drive failure aren't going to be all that bad for me.

Get a raptor to use as your main OS drive. :2 cents:

I found one where they actually took the 2 640Gb drives into RAID and put them against the newest raptor: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2288836,00.asp

needless to say I think that just answered my question...

At the price I can basically get both the 640Gb drives cheaper than I can get 1 of the latest raptor... get more speed and considerably more storage all in 1 low price.

I still have a set of the 1st gen raptors in use right now. Back then they were the shit!

I have a 1st gen think it's the 27 gig and a newer 80 gig. It just really depends what you do with them. If you're a gamer, then you will notice games load faster with them.

from what I'm seeing in most things a single 640Gb is about the same speed as the 150Gb raptors but when you RAID the 640Gb drives they're better than the new 300Gb $300 velociraptor in most things all while still being ~$100 cheaper and so much more actual space.

I don't play ANY games except for the occasional baseball mogul or civilization type DATA intensive one. I don't play any real 3d games. Most of what I do is video encoding and PHP/MySQL development. Fast hard drives do help when it comes to video encoding and extracting data both of which eat up storage space like crazy so a single 150Gb drive won't help me all that much wheras having 1.2Tb worth of fast disk will certainly be handy...

I'm going to be ordering these drives tonight if I get some added paypal before I head to bed ;)

Raptors are nice, especially in RAID0, but the crazy thing is, the new Samsung 1TB drives are in some ways even faster. I think it was Tom's Hardware did a comparison and it was pretty shocking.

well a decent raid controller will cost you some $$$ unless your planning on using the crap raid built into many boards nowdays.

decent old controller is about $130

What OS is this on and is it onboard RAID? If it's Windows + Intel ICHR then I have a few "choice" words about this type of setup. Then again my experience is somewhat tainted by hardware failure: need a drive whacked? Send it to me. Guaranteed it will fail within a few months! (I've had 7 failures in the past 3 years)

What's the application you're using that demands faster access and/or raw r/w speed? If it's just to make you feel better, then consider a single 1TB drive instead. :2 cents:

Also, remember RAID is generally for availability, not data security.

RAID0 is the exception, if a drive fails your computer will be down until it can be replaced. How will that affect you?

I would also recommend sticking your OS on a separate drive, keep boot+applications separate to your RAIDed data. It's saved me a lot of headaches doing it this way.

Agreed.
:thumbsup