So Im doing some more upgrading and thought about ramping up the HDD speed and
quality. Im going to make my current barracuda storage and put a faster one in its
place for OS, and such.
I was looking at Velociraptors, however they arent cheap but how worth it can they be?


I was hoping for some good ideas, however im not looking to spend the money for a
SSD setup unless its cheaper than I think., or so much more worth it than buying a 2nd 4870?

This is actually a topic of which I never really learned a lot about. It would be cool to get a good collection of links and ideas on one page.

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Phenom II 955
Cooler Master V8
ASUS M3A79-T Deluxe 790FX
2 x Sapphire 4870 1GB GDDR5
4GB GSkill Pi Black 1066
2 x 74GB WD Raptor 16mb RAID-0
640GB WD Caviar Black 32mb
Cooler Master HAF 932
Antec Quattro 850w

I dont know how fast the Barracuda runs, But the Raptor drives are faster then normal drives, but is it worth it? In my opinion its not worth the extra money for them. I have 2 Raptors and yea its faster, but not by a whole lot, In a benchmark its much faster then a standard drive, but in normal everyday stuff, you probably wouldnt even notice the difference. Just my opinion tho.

Now i do have the Raptors that where prior to the Volciraptors, but i believe as far as speeds and response times they are the same, I just think the Vraptors have more storage space.
On average with my drives as single drives, they run at about 80MB/s read and write. In raid 0 its about 160MB/s

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i7 2600K - Asus Maximus Extreme-Z - G.Skill DDR3 2133 CL9 - MSI 5870 - Corsair 1200w PSU - 2 x Western Digital Raptors Raid 0 - Swiftech Apogee XT Water Block - Swiftech MCP655 Pump - 120mm Quad Rad - Windows 7 - Ubuntu x64

5311Mhz Validation

If I was looking to upgrade my drives I would be looking at the 1TB Samsung spinpoint F1's. It's what I should have bought instead of my 750gb which are slightly slower but money was an issue when I bought them.

I've always been satisfied with Seagate's HDDs... Until my latest 500GB Barracuda died unexpectedly last week. Well, it's still spinning, but it acquired a massive amount of bad sectors and delay zones and, as it hits a bad sectors, it stops functioning. And it's been in my system only for 9 months...

As a replacement, i got a WD Caviar Blue 640GB and there's no noticeable performance difference. Even though this one has only 16MB cache, thus half that of the Barracuda. For file copying on the same disk, it operates at an average of 30MB/s and for disk to disk copy it operates at more than ~100MB/s. So, basically the same performance as the Barracuda.

If you want a Seagate, I'd suggest you avoid buying online. If possible, better get it from a retailer and insist to see where it has been produced: avoid the ones made in China at all costs! Mine unfortunately was one of these and it's the first Seagate I've ever had that died so soon and so badly (in fact none of my other ones has any problem of any kind).

The Velociraptors are very good as far as I know. They cost about 5 times more than a HDD with the same capacity. I found that:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...een-wd20eads-review/6
I think its not worth it now, the Velociraptor has not enough improvement over a Samsung Spinpoint. I am a Samsung-fan. They are cooler than the Seagates, performance and price are about the same.

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Phenom II 940 @3.40GHz 1,35V|Xigmatek HDT-SD964|Foxconn A79A-S|4GB Kingston HyperX 1066 CL5 2.0V|Sapphire HD4830 512MB|Sharkoon Avenger|LC6600GP2 600W
http://www.sysprofile.de/id99196