Question about the VelociRaptor

Hey guys, I hope this is an easy question to answer because I seriously know nothing about hard drives, but I was wondering if I was to either get the WD Raptor 150gb or the VelociRaptor 300gb (I know they are relatively small HDD's and Samsung do a very quick 1TB drive) if I would see any performance gain from moving Steam and all it's games to that drive and running everything from there. Or would I have to reinstall my OS on the new drive to see a difference? If I only have to install steam on it to see a difference that would be great.

so I guess put simply my question is; are there any noticable performance gains to be had from the WD drives, such as loading quicker or fps increase, if so is it worth shelling out the money?

just in case they are required here are my current pc specs:

Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40ghz (4CPUs)
Windows Vista™ Home Premium (SP1)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra 768mb
2GB Corsair DDR2 800Mhz Unbuffered XMS2 (DHX technology) RAM

I apologise if there is a thread relating to this topic already I did browse and saw nothing.

Faster is faster
So as fast as possible.
Get a raptor 150 more gigs is slower.
Store your stuff on anything but put the XP and games on a fast type thing

This is a topic that will get a variety of opinions due to a lot of conflicting information and benchmarks on the internet.

It is my opinion and a opinion which is based on my experience testing raptors and other drives on the same system that you will notice a increase in performance and speed by using a 10,000 rpm hard drive. The increase in performance will not been seen in more FPS but rather loading times. By loading times I mean the time it takes once you start the game to get to the menu and also the time it takes to load maps which have already been downloaded to your hard drive. The difference is noticable with a single raptor and even slightly more noticeable with a pair of raptors in a raid 0 config. Some people will point you too tests that say this is not true, however I saw improvements by doing it. The improvements are small as in a few seconds, but they are faster.

If I were building a system today and my budget allowed for it, I would most definitely buy a 300 gb velociraptor as well as a 1 TB drive. The 150 gb drive is too small IMO, you would be surprised how fast it fills up if you buy games like I do.

The way to do it is to put your OS and games on the velociraptor and everything else (such as music, movies, pictures ect) on the secondary 1 TB drive. Being that the gains are minute by using a raid 0 config, I would not do it again but rather put that money towards the 1 TB drive. Ive had 2 sets of raptors in 2 different machines running for over 2 years daily, so they are reliable drives no problems as of yet, even in raid 0.

yea what he said.

have a fast drive for the main hard drive so u can load up application and programs and os process allot faster. Then just have a large secondary drive for music,films,work,projects and porn and what ever else that is not a program. Having a slower speed won't make much a difference i believe for the backup drive and might be a waste of money if u got a fast drive as a backup.

I have used raptors (150GB) in RAID and noticed no difference in read speeds or OS boot timest. However i cannot comment on the velociraptors although I speculate any gains will be negligable.
The velociraptors are the same RPM but are 3GB/sec unlike the raptors which are the old 1.5GB/sec.
Make sure whicever drive 10,00RPM drive you go for you keep it cool as they get seriously hot.
I since removed 1 raptor and used it in my PS3 which dramtically decreased install tmes from downloded games I even timd it by installing GT5P.
Standard 40GB 8mins
Raptor 150GB 3 mins 22 seconds.


If you want to backup your data then use 4 drives in RAID mirroring 2 for OS 2for backup data purposes, i know a guy tha uses 6 75GB raptors in this way.

The fastest hdd out now is the 300 gb velociraptor and if you are down with paying top dollar for small gains then that is what you should buy. But that said in almost all real world situation it would be a waste of money since the 1/3 priced Samsung F1 or WD 640 GB would be almost the same performance some times losing by a little sometimes winning in all but 1 or 2 tests. On top of that the only time this junk matters for gaming is when you are loading the level and for an extra 200$ i dont think the 1 second you save is worth it considering the gaming all happens after the level loads, upgrading your ram will do much more for level loads then 50 raptors in raid. Second the 150Gb raptor or any old one is a complete waste of money because it is out performed in every aspect by the latest normal 7200 RPM drives and has been for a while. Buying the older raptors is a step backwards unless you can get them for say 80$ i think you are getting ripped off.

The final point is we are now at a transition in the storage market as performance storage is about to be overtaken by the SSD. It really makes very little sense to bother purchasing a raptor when in probably 6 months SSDs that come in at less then 300 dollars will beat it in every single possible test. Currently the slow write is the only thing they are really losing in and they are almost to the point of beating the best hard drives in that. SSDs do not spin and so make no noise and are cooler and just plain better in so many ways. I would save my money and wait for them grab a WD 640 GB hdd and you will be all set running at 99% of the performance of a raptor 99% of the time.

EDIT: I should mention that most people do not seem to know that the performance of a hard drive is not just about RPM. The areal density of data is a major factor. The raptors are only updated like once every 5 years. And in that first year they are strong drives but they quickly fall behind to the average hard drive when more dense platters are available.

would you mind explaining a little more about SSDs ? Had never heard of that and seems something interesting ;o

You know what a flash drive is?
or thumb drive or thumbito drivito what they call it in spanish i think?
Basically the SSDs are a giant array of flash memory from 32 GB to 256 GB. No moving parts so they call them solid state. This is what performance storage is moving to probably best to google it further.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/o ... ist=msr_20

thumbito drivito what they call it in spanish i think?

wow that sounds nerdish and dumb >.< had never heard of it being called that way.
Yeah I know what flash drive is, and it kinda explains everything you said pretty fast.
thanks for the info fearsome.

I have 2 150 gb raptors in a raid 0 array. I have never compaired to a single raptor, but it seems to make sense that when you have 2 drives doing the work of 1, it will be almost if not twice as fast to access the information on them. Whether that is significant compaired to the speed of the Velociraptor, I dont know. Velociraptors were not available when I built my computer and from what it sounds, I probably wouldnt have wanted to spend the extra money. I do know that it is fast and I am usually one of the first ones on when a map changes if not the first. Whether that means anything, who knows, but for pubbing at least I can get the jump on the competition for the goodies.

Paradox wrote: I do know that it is fast and I am usually one of the first ones on when a map changes if not the first. Whether that means anything, who knows, but for pubbing at least I can get the jump on the competition for the goodies.

Yep thats where I notice it also, I am usually in the next map 10 or more seconds before anyone else.

L2k wrote:

Paradox wrote: I do know that it is fast and I am usually one of the first ones on when a map changes if not the first. Whether that means anything, who knows, but for pubbing at least I can get the jump on the competition for the goodies.

Yep thats where I notice it also, I am usually in the next map 10 or more seconds before anyone else.

Is that how that happens? I'm usually there before others wake up too, but my HDD setup consists of 1 partitioned 80gig IDE ATA66 drive. I had chalked it up to network stuff

haymaker wrote:

Is that how that happens? I'm usually there before others wake up too, but my HDD setup consists of 1 partitioned 80gig IDE ATA66 drive. I had chalked it up to network stuff

I think you have a point there with the network side, I sometimes get stuck on "sending client info" and players with much slower PC are in map before me.

of course having a good connection and network is going to play a part of connecting fast. However so is the ability of your cpu to read the data from your HDD and load it into the game.

There arent any 7200 rpm Hdds that out perform any of the Raptors. Decreased loading times mean all programs and even Windows component load faster equaling a faster system. Raid may not increase performance but this depends on the controller.

Raptors are also Enterprise quality. The are high grade high quality drives.
The new sata interface may increase performance, but that would apply to all drives.

There are expensive SCSI drives that run at 15000 rpm and pawn.

A single 150 Raptor and one 1T 7200 for storage is the best capacity/performance/dollar solution.

Besides fans and switches, drives have the only moving parts in a PC and the primary bottleneck in any potential system.

Faster is better.

(Yes, that should have read DECREASED loading times/Access times)

wow thanks everyone, this has been a great help, especially SSD's which i'd not heard of until reading this thread (well i'd heard of flash drives but nothing on them replacing HDD's). I feel i can make a purchase and head from there.

Again thankyou for your time and assistance!

Flash technology's coming (see the macbook Air "hdd") wich is way better than any Hard disk.

That's like comparing a black and white TV with a 47" Plasma HD flatscreen.

Buy w/e, good and cheap, and wait for that to come out if you were willing to pay a high price.

Fearsome hit the nail on the head. It isn't worth the extra money, end of story. Anybody that says otherwise is just justifying their purchase. You'd be better off spending the extra $$ on any other more important computer part which will provide a more significant gain in performance. Hell, even a keyboard/mouse would probably be a better investment. I would recommend the WD 640GB (also as Fearsome stated). I used it in my new build and it works great. Shaving a few seconds off of your loading time which is only important in pub servers isn't worth the cash.

Hard Drive performance is the major bottleneck to any system. Why would any one build a badass fast system and settle for a bottleneck?

But, there is a price/performance point.
For most, any SATA drive will work.
Faster is still better.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... lociraptor

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... %20digital

Performance difference? Negligible.

Price difference? Over $200.

That was my point. For $200 you can buy a top of the line graphics card, a top of the line processor, a water cooling system, an amazing pair of headphones, 4gb of high performance ram, etc etc. Spending $200 on a Velociraptor is the last thing you should do.

Here are some benchmarks:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdo ... i=3291&p=8



So in terms of pure gaming performance (level load times) you're spending $200 to shave off a couple of seconds at most. Nice way to waste your money.

Raptors are also Enterprise quality and carry a 5 year lim. warranty instead of 3.
Also, Raptors excel at access time, like accessing a page file or app components.
There, Raptors make systems faster.
True, they are more expensive and a gamer should put that 200 into a new GPU.

Raptors are still the premier mechanical Hard drive.