Raptor Hard Drives

[macpac22 0]

Howdywas thinking of purchasing a raptor hard drive but just wondering does it have much of a performance inprovement in frames for the 747 or FS in general over a normal hard drive? What i want to do is seperate FS from WindowsXP and give FS its own hard drive. I want to run the Queen with the best possible setup to get the most out of it. Cheers

[Guest bigun]

Hi Paul,I'm running two Raptors now on my new box. One is dedicated to FS only. While I really can't say what kind of improvement it made because the whole machine is very much upgraded, I do have very quick load times for FS. Don't expect ANY increase in framerates by going to a faster hard drive. You may get a reduction in "stutters" while FS is accessing the drive to load terrain, you won't see any increase in frame rates if all else is equal.

[macpac22 0]

thanks george, i think ill go with a raptor drive to improve loading times

[Guest Ray CYYZ]

Any single drive isn't going to make much difference. Turning multiple drives into a RAID0 array will make a huge difference.You'll even find that two slower drives running this way will outperform any single faster drive because you are combining the read speeds of both drives.Striping like this gives you effectively (80%-90% x 2 x speed of drive) vs a single faster drive giving you (100% x speed of drive).Side note: RAID0 means you better have backups as when a drive fails you loose EVERYTHING on all your drives so the performance comes with a price tag ;-)Ray

[mburkhard 23]

I agree. Two raptor drives @ RAID 0 is the way to go these days. Combine that with a 64bit CPU and Windows and your loading times go up through the roof! :)Regards,Markus

[Guest Ray CYYZ]

I personally wouldn't spend money on SATA 150 devices at all, but thats just me ... if you are buying new hardware, make sure it's SATA 300 with NCQ ... they will run on the older SATA motherboards until such time as you upgrade futher.Haven't seen any tests that show a 10,000 rpm Raptor on a SATA 150 bus is going to outperform an 7,200 rpm Cavier on a SATA 300/NCQ busYou might be paying for nothing more then heat with those extra rpm's :-lolOn a side note, i wouldn't touch a WD drive if you paid for it ... too many dead drives over the years from WD, none from Seagate, either it's just my luck or ... I have 8 Seagate 7200.9 SATA 300's running here and am quite happy with them.RayEdit:http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1...lead/page8.htmlRaid0 still kicks butt ;-)

[Guest D17S]

I have a couple of 7200 rpm PATA 160 gig-O-bites that set I up as a raid 0. Works great. A pal has a raptor on his rig and I wanted to see the difference between my 7200 rpm PATA raid and that single 10,000 rpm raptor. It was very close. My raid xfer'd at 70mbs and the raptor xfer'd at 67mps. But the price difference! I spent $40 each for my 2 old fashioned 7200 PATA 160s (watch the ads) and 14.99 for the raid card. For $100, I got a the equivalent of a 300 gig single drive raptor. You know what those raptors cost!Still a raptor raid? That

[macpac22 0]

does anyone have any links on how to set up Raid 0?

[mburkhard 23]

>does anyone have any links on how to set up Raid 0?Paul,that depends on what motherboard you are using. Normally it's written in the board's manual. Have a look there...Regards,Markus

[Guest D17S]

I think that any onboard raid is going to be SATA these days. So if someone is thinking about raiding the older PATA drives, an addon card will be necessary. 15 bucks ought to buy one and the instructions about "How to" will be with the card. Remember the difference between PATA and the newer SATA drives is only the buss they hook up to. The harddrives themselves, preformance wise, are within 5% of each other. A PATA can be faster, by a nanosecond, or maybe the SATA takes the micro lead. It simply doesn't matter, except for the way it's connected to the computer. 95% of the speed of a drive is about its RPM. 5400 RPM is the mainstay for laptops, 7200 for desktops anbd then there's that 10,000 raptor. That's the big dog. It is all about its RPM (plus maybe a tweek here and there), but has nothing to do with its SATA buss. The raptor's transfer rate is about 70mps. It has a SATA buss that can transfer at 150mps. That's actually a rediculous over kill. It would be fine as long as it had a 'pipeline' (buss) that can handle at least 70 mps. It would not have been slowed down a bit if had used the old PATA 100/133 mps buss. This is because 100/133mps is still plenty of capaciety to allow the raptors to transfer at their full 70 mps. The smaller cables are VERY nice to work with. It really makes a cleaner instillation. But so far, preformance wise, this Serial ATA stuff is all just marketing nonesense. So, if you have a newer MB with lots ot SATA hookups and onboard raid, then SATA drives are the way to go. If not, PATAs with an add-on PCI card will provide idential preformance.

[Guest SKireyev]

>Any single drive isn't going to make much difference. Turning>multiple drives into a RAID0 array will make a huge>difference.>>You'll even find that two slower drives running this way will>outperform any single faster drive because you are combining>the read speeds of both drives.>>Striping like this gives you effectively (80%-90% x 2 x speed>of drive) vs a single faster drive giving you (100% x speed of>drive).>>Side note: RAID0 means you better have backups as when a drive>fails you loose EVERYTHING on all your drives so the>performance comes with a price tag ;-)>>RayI am going to disagree with you there. I run two 7200 RPM hard-drives in RAID 0, and I also have a 150 Gb Raptor. The Raptor smokes the RAID array flat out. That is why I now rely on the Raptor stictly for running FS, and on the RAID array to run the rest of the programs.You should also research how the RAID I/O works with the FS, since the read speeds of the drives are not exactly 'combined', so you don't get a straightforward 2x of the I/O performance out of the striped array. In the case of an intensive project with large (100s of Mb) file sizes RAID 0 would provide a good performance boost. Where load times are dependent on loading small files, which fit by a dozen into a single segment, each drive reads those files at the 7200 RPM speed, and while the other drive is waiting for the entire segment to be read. There is a plethora of articles on the matter in the Flightsim and Avsim forums with actual numbers on the matter.And for the sake of performance, don't forget that the buffer on the Raptor is also 4 times larger.

[Guest D17S]

That's very interesting. You may have read that I did a head to head with my own 7200 rpm raid 0 set against a friend

[mburkhard 23]

Edit:Removed my post after reading Sergey's post a second time...Regards,Markus

[Guest Ray CYYZ]

Hmm, thats interesting ... my Seagates have the exact same size cache as the Raptor. Guess you have to compare apples to apples when discussing this. Got some of those cheap OEM ones do you?You also might note that stripe size is *user* controllable, so if you are dealing with lots of smaller files, you lower the size of the stripe to adjust accordingly.My array using the above utility: (2 by 300 G Seagate 7200.9's)57.1 MB/sec minimum115.7 MB/sec maximum94.6 MB/sec average12.7 ms Access Time182.7 MB/sec Burst Rate4.6% CPU UsageRay

[Guest Buck Bolduc]

I've been running 2x 74 gig Raptors in RAID-0 for 2 yeras with 0 problems. Very fast!A-64 3400MSI mobo1 gig CorsairNVidia 6800GTNXI just built a guy a new machine.A64x2 4800MSI Diamond PlusNVidia 7800GTX SLI2 gigs Corsair150 GB Maxtor HD 7200 RPMMy machine loads files way, way, faster.When switching screens I see no waiting for textures, he does.His HD is handcuffing his machine. Now he's waiting to come up with the money to install 2x 150 gig Raptors in RAID-0.The Raptor 150 single is faster than my RAID setup, w/ it's 16Mb cache.The 150 set up with RAID-0 must be something else, gotta be.I'll find out when I install em.Guy's a great fellow and good customer. Poor man can't change battery's in a flashlight without breaking it?Hate's screwdrivers!!!