Well the title pretty much says it all, I just want to know the performance difference between having a WD Raptor (I read a statistic stating it at 1200mb/s) as a primary drive or a drive in SATAII 3gig/s configuration. The SATAII would seem like the more likely canidate although it is alot more affordable which brings it into question. Now I would just go with the Raptor although seeing as how I am kinda on a budget I would like know if I could get similiar performance at a much less cost. Oh and please don't treat me like a complete idiot and asks question like "are you sure you have a campatible motherboard" and such as I know what I'm doing Im just don't have much experience with hard drives.
go here man they review everything: http://www.pcstats.com/ open page look to right they review everything also this one: http://www.anandtech.com/
The Raptor will be the faster drive, SATA II performance is a THEORITICAL 3gb/s, the ACTUAL performance of these drives is only slightly better than the IDE drives that they are based on. The Raptor is based on a SCSI drive and has SCSI like performance. If you were to put several SATA II drives in a Raid 0 or striped array, each on its own controller then you'd it would be competitive to the Raptor. The downside to using several drives in RAID 0 as the boot disk is that if any disk has a problem then the whole array is screwed. Newegg has a rebate on the 74gb Raptor so it's about $150 after rebate and shipping. Lots of reviews on the net, anandtech.com tomshardware.com will show the superiority of the Raptor. Check this link... http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/index.html No comparison as you can see.
yea the raptor is alittle faster but the raptors only have 74 gb of disk space where as a sata 11 disc will go up to 500gb if you have the money.i think the fastest sata 11 hard drive is a hitachi 7?rtdk something like that.look on newegg here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822145087 they say this one even beat out the raptors in a non-raid config of course two raptors in raid 0 is smokin fast
Okay good information to know. So how you I set up the SATA II drives to get the best performance (I'm looking at the Hitachi Deskstars).
you can buy 2 and set them in raid 0.if you dont have a onboard sata2 controller on mobo then you can pick up a raid 0 pci controller and add it too pc.you could also just run 1 in sata 2 and get the 300mb a second transfer which is double sata 1 which was 150mb per second.i read this artical after i purchased my hard drive so i bought the western digital 250gb 16mb cache sata 2 hard drive which isnt any sloch either.i dont know what hardware to use to test the speed do you.this thing runs pretty sweet in gaming.
Burgers if you create a signature then folks will be able to help you mucho better. Even if you haven't bought the parts yet, put in your the items that you're thinking about and folks can comment on the build. Setting up a Raid 0 will change depending on your motherboard, most new motherboards have a built in raid controller, mine has two, the NVIDIA raid and a SLI raid controller. If you have or are thinking of buying a DFI board then check out dfi-street.com, this is the official DFI motherboard forum with several employees and thousands of users adding to the mix. There's multiple threads on every topic and dozens on setting up raid on DFI boards. On my board in the bios I enable the channels that my raid drives are on as RAID, then during the boot I'm given the option of hitting F4 and setting up the raid array and I can choose which drives and what type. Very simple unless you want it to be a boot disk. Windows XP Pro., SP 2 wants to see a specific cluster size on the Raid array or it won't install, I think this goes for Windows XP, SP2 as well.
