10,000rpm hardrives worth it?

[Tsakali_]

should i spend the money on one for the windows partition? they do seem to be on a group of their own when it comes to pricing so do they really worth the praise?

more to the point: i want to speed up my bottleneck when computing and I think that a fast hdd is what i should get next.

I want things to load faster , everything else on my system runs well enough to be a non issue

[Foo]

In order of my preference:

non-raid single drive 5.4k
non-raid single drive 7.2k
raid stripe 2 drives 7.2k
raid stripe 2 drives 10k

A single 10k drive I wouldn't generally consider... seems a bit pointless when you can get 2 x 7ks and get equivalent if not a bit better performance.

A decent controller chip on the motherboard is important too... but it's important in all cases.

[AmIdYfReAk]

a nice 7200RPM SATA2 HDD with >8mb cache will be fast, if you are looking for Uber speed, then you would need to look into the Raid 0 Recommendations that foo listed.

atm, i'm running two 74gig WD Raptors in Raid 0 ( striping ), mmm, uber

[obsidian]

Wondering, what would be faster? Any benchmarks to show the difference?
1 10K raptor
2 7200 in RAID

[Foo]

Depends on the controller. On a decent controller, the RAID.

[creep]

A single 10k drive I wouldn't generally consider... seems a bit pointless when you can get 2 x 7ks and get equivalent if not a bit better performance.

If performance is equal you should turn to other factors for consideration... such as reliability.
A 2 disk RAID has 2x the chance of failure as a single drive. (actually slightly more, since a single drive can be read from any standard controller, and a RAID array will require another similar RAID controller if the controller fails)

Just to throw it out there for those that don't know... if you lose 1 drive in a stripe set, you lose all the data.

[Kills On Site]

So I typed this really long reply and then accidentally closed the window, but anywho.

I have a 74GB WD Raptor, I am very pleased with it. Back when I upgraded to it the difference was very noticable; maps in games loaded faster, Photoshop and Trillian also loaded much quicker. Windows load time didn't seem that affected, but all intensive programs definately were. This was back on an Athlon XP with an nForce 2 chipset.

Now I have the Raptor in a computer with a Core 2 Quad and an Intel P35 chipset. I also have a near identical computer for the family that has a 7,200 RPM drive, 250GB.

Note that all Raptors, which from what I know is the only commercially available 10,000 RPM HDD, are SATA 150, not SATA 3.0 Gb/s. The HDD that is in the second computer is SATA 3.0 Gb/s. Why Western-Digital has stuck with SATA 150 instead of upgrading is a mystery to me.

Between the two computers I honestly can't tell a difference between the two as far as load times of programs. Haven't played many online games lately, so I can't compare load times with other people. Although, I have not used the two computers right after one another yet, when I was building the family computer I was using an old P4, which I hated. So there may infact be a difference, I just don't seem to notice it much anymore.

With the 150GB version of the Raptor being around $150-160, its definately not as steep as it once was for a Raptor.