VelociRaptor or regular HDD?

[Octopuss]

I got 1TB Samsung SpinPoint disk at the moment and I really like it.

But recently I've been thinking about getting extra physical drive for system. So. I cannot decide whether to grab 74GB VCR or another relatively fast and reliable 7k2 TB one. I am running short on disk space, but it's not that big problem (it's mostly movies anyway). The ultimate argument is the price for GB.... 74GB for x or 1000GB for about the same price. the speed on VCR is nice though. I just can't decide.

[CoffeeFiend]

No one can decide for yourself.

Personally I need a LOT of space (I really gotta get a few more TBs soon). Speed is nice, but not to the point where I'll pay an incredible premium like that for it (and even then, SSDs are becoming an option too for those who want speed at any price).

I/O speed is becoming a bit less of an issue in my case, in part because with > 4GB your system doesn't need to page to disk much even when you're doing very heavy multitasking, running very heavy apps, or using VMs and such. Also because of less frequent boots (if anything, I just set the machine to sleep), and even apps starting are faster anyways (pre-loaded by superfetch in a lot of cases).

But someone who uses next to no disk space, has less RAM, and just wants raw I/O speed would buy the raptor likely... But then again, it's mostly a question of access times, as 2 decent quality drives drives will beat the raptor in throughput anyways and offer a LOT more space for the same price...

[Octopuss]

I originally wanted to buy another same drive for backup purposes, but recently I've been a bit annoyed by having the data on same physical drive. It doesn't help the performance too much, either. It's just that I see no point in having non-system data on the disk where OS is installed.

Edited January 14, 2009 by TheWalrus

[CoffeeFiend]

I've been a bit annoyed by having the data on same physical drive

How's that an issue? Because you can't easily reinstall Windows or something? Just partition it then...

It doesn't help the performance too much, either.

It probably doesn't make that much of a difference really, unless you have some kind of app with a particular usage pattern, that will make the drive seek a lot (how much data it loads, where it's physically placed/how it's partitioned, etc). I've never seen that impact overall system performance very much (for typical everyday desktop usage anyhow). Fragmentation might be an issue for some people (depending what they do), but then again it's the things like newly downloaded files and such that will mainly get fragmented (the previously defragged system files won't move by themselves to a fragmented area), and that's easily solved too.

Again, it's your money. At the same price, the raptor offers 7.4% of the space, or to put it another way, it costs 13.5x as much per GB. That's pretty awful IMO. You can even get MUCH faster 15k rpm SAS drives for not a whole lot more (then again you need the SAS controller). Personally I chose space over speed, but it's perfectly fine to prefer paying for speed too, just like some people don't mind dropping hundreds of $ on fancy vid cards I got absolutely no use for.

Edit: BTW, your Spinpoint F1 is faster than the original 74GB raptor in every way but access time, if that's what you were considering buying: it scores like 75% faster in read burst (in hdtach), 50% faster average read speed, 33% faster average write speed. Your drives scores like 1/3 higher in PCMark05 too.

Edited January 14, 2009 by crahak

[Maleko]

well, ask yourself...speed or space?

simple choice really.

if it were me, i would have my OS and programs on a VCR drive (maybe even 2 74GB in RAID), then have other good high capacity drives for storage and documents (remap my documents).

[Octopuss]

Nono, not original Raptor, VelociRaptor

Of course I got the disk partitioned.

I run Vista64 and usually I play one particular rather resource-demanding game with plenty of stuff running in background - say, browser, Winamp, ICQ, file manager, mail, AND also torrents. Now the last thing, that's a problem, because with my 30mbit connection I got no problems forcing the hdd led shine almost permamently, which effectively makes it impossible for any other disk operations to work normally (that is where RAID or VCR would come handy )

So with rather heavy multitasking and lots of hdd activity I thought about VCR as system drive with all the installed apps (some of which can probably make the hdd sweat a lot) in there, and other unimportant yet permanently running stuff switched on the second line where they wouldn't bug me.

Maleko: yeah I guess so. I wish the spinPoint was 2TB I definitely don't want to have more than 2 disks though. But hell, if I get p***ed off enough, I will create some network storage in the closet; with 1gbit network it would be just as fast to access movies this way as if they were in the PC

Edited January 14, 2009 by TheWalrus

[ripken204]

i would only suggest the 1TB for storage, i dont see the point really in using them as an OS drive.

i have 4x1TB for just storage then some 640s for my different OSes.

1TB is cheap now anyways, they can be had for $100, if you can save up a little more then then get two hdds, one for OS, and another for storage.

Edited January 18, 2009 by ripken204