I have used Raptors for some time now, and will offer my two cents 
worth.

I have found that in Morrowind there is a place where you have to pause 
for a moment while data is loaded from the disk. For a while I was using 
two 36GB Raptors in a RAID configuration, and the pause was 
significantly shortened over the older drive that I had been using. 
Then I moved to a single 75GB drive, and found that the pause time was 
about the same as the raid drives, so there was a significant 
improvement.  I am now using a 150GB drive, but have not had anything to 
compare it to recently.  (I quit using the two single drives in raid 
configuration because I was concerned about reliability.)

I suspect that any program that uses a lot of data will benefit from the 
increased average transfer times that a Raptor will offer.  A large disk 
cache is also useful.

I am not sure about your question about the price, but an oem drive from 
NewEgg is MUCH less expensive than a retail drive from CompUSA!  (same 
drive)  In my experience, I have found WD drives to be somewhat 
unreliable, so it is possible that being able to easily return a faulty 
drive to the store may be worth some premium in price.

I don't need a lot of disk space for what I do (mainly games and email, 
with some music and digital pictures), so the smaller Raptor drives with 
superior performance suit my needs very well.  And, their noise is not 
that bad, at least compared to the noisy video card.

Dean Kukral


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2007 8:23 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] best use of raptor HDs


Greetings All!

 I am getting ready to add 1 or 2 hard drives to a home built computer 
with
the following hardware:

SOYO Dragon2 386PE mobo (HT enabled)
P4 3.2 HT processor
WD 74GB 10,000 rpm Raptor SATA HD
Audigy pro sound card
Visiontec Radion 9250 128Mb pci (hope to upgrade this as well in near 
future)
(2x) 1GB corsair xms ram

My main uses of this system are studio audio mixing/recording/processing
(using Adobe Audition),
Video editing (using Adobe Premiere) and some gaming (Halo, Doom3, 
etc.)

I figure 74GB will get eaten up pretty quick with audio and video files 
as
well as windows and other programs
so I've been looking at WD 150GB 10,000 rpm Raptor(s) as an addition.

My main concerns are:
-should I reload software to the HD with files associated to it 
(Premiere
and video files on one HD and Audition and music files on another)?
-Why do different Raptors with the same memory space/latency/seek 
time/write
time/cache have such a wide range of prices(120.00 to 240.00) and  would
these differences have any impact on my uses?
-Is it just over-kill to use 10,000 rpm HDs for my purposes?

I realize there are a lot of better/faster processors and hardware than 
what
I'm running but I can't afford a new "super-system" at present so I'm 
hoping
to get the most out of what I have.

Thanks for any suggestions,
-Phil Williams-

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