Thinking of "upgrading" to WD Raptor 10K over my current drive...

[the b man]

Hi, im building a new rig and I purchased 2 1TB Western Digital 7200RPM Black Caviar Drives to put into my new rig, however lately I have been thinking about possibly selling one of these drives to get one of these...

Western Digital WD Raptor 10K RPM SATA 160GB Hard Drive - eBay (item 150420041642 end time Jun-01-10 11:21:40 PDT)

Im a bit hesitant to do this because I am using this PC for playing Multimedia type stuff such as HD video, and I tend to use up hard drive space like nobody's business. So I may need that 2 TB of space. At the same time, I am going to be upgrading to Windows 7 soon and would like a 10K RPM drive to put my OS on for optimum speed when doing random things on my computer.

My question is, with the hard drive that I have linked to, will that drive truly read and write significantly faster than the Black Caviar drives I currently have? Because if the difference is only going to be very minor, then I would rather just stick with what I have, but if I will see a significant difference in "snappiness" when booting up, shutting down, and other things like that, then I may want to go with the 10K drive. I know that not all drives of the same speed are created equal, and I have seen some specs where 7200RPM drives end up being even faster than certain 10K drives, so I want to get my facts straight before I do this.

 

[kmote]

Those 10k drives are not worth it. Stick with "standard" HDDs or an SSD if you can afford it.

 

[the b man]

ok... but could you give any reasoning behind them not being worth it?

 

[kmote]

They are low capacity, expensive and aren't much faster, if at all, than normal drives. They don't have any of the advantages of enterprise 10k or 15k drives either.

 

[InsaneJester17]

I agree with kmote. Get an SSD for your operating drive and keep your 2 1tb's for files. You'll get smaller size for the money but the speed is much much faster. All you really need is a 40 - 60gb drive for your OS and programs.

 

[the b man]

I understand your point, but as far as price and space is concerned, I am aware of these things. I have priced out this specific drive and I should be able to get one for around what I paid for the 1TB drive, so price really isnt an issue, nor is space because I would be getting this specifically for running the OS off of. But if im in fact not going to see much of a speed increase, then no it would not be worth it to me.

I have admittedly not done a whole lot of research on SSD's, but from what I have read I have seen that they tend to be extremely unreliable. Ive heard a lot of horror stories about them simply not lasting very long, and some of them dying within a matter of months. That is absolutely not an option for me, I will need something that I KNOW is going to last me a long time. Also, unless pricing has changed on them recently, they are VERY expensive, a lot more than what a 10k drive would cost me. Money happens to be VERY tight for me right now, so something expensive is simply not an option for me right now.

Now if things have changed recently as far as their reliability and price, then by all means please inform me, and I will certainly look at it as an option. But if things are still iffy in those areas, then this simply isnt going to be an option for me right now. Please let me know, thanks.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

I've had an SSD running for about 8 months now, and it's still going just fine.
With the earlier SSD models/firmware there were a few glitches, but these days it's all fine.

We're even upgrading one of the main servers in our company to SSD drives, and that definitely needs to be failure free! So yeah, what I'm trying to say is you don't have to worry about the reliability any more than you would a 'normal' drive.

 

[PP Mguire]

I have an earlier model SSD that does about 170MB/s read and 90-120MB/s write. Ive had this thing a tad over a year and i have had absolutely no problems with it at all.

If your an HD movie watcher i suggest keeping that 1tb because if the 160 raptor is about the same price as your 1tb then youre going to be disappointed. Velociraptors only really get good performance close to low grade SSD when you RAID 0 them and then price to performance isnt worth it. For the same price you can get an SSD to stick your OS on and it will be quieter, produce less heat, and be about 2x the speed of a raptor drive. Read and write speed isnt everything to be visually faster. Its also response time with random reads and writes where mechanical drives tend to fail.

I had 2 OEM 74gb velociraptors in RAID 0 and went to this SSD BTW. 64gb has been plenty for me for a few games, CS4, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Catch is, i also have a server with 3tbs worth of drives holding all my movies, tv shows, and games.

 

[Druid]

I agree with kmote. Get an SSD for your operating drive and keep your 2 1tb's for files. You'll get smaller size for the money but the speed is much much faster. All you really need is a 40 - 60gb drive for your OS and programs.

Yeah, I suppose if you aren't gaming that is fine, but as a gamer, you'd need more space than that for all your games. You're going to want those faster load times. I don't think this dude is a gamer though, so this works.

 

[PP Mguire]

Yeah, I suppose if you aren't gaming that is fine, but as a gamer, you'd need more space than that for all your games. You're going to want those faster load times. I don't think this dude is a gamer though, so this works.

Im a heavy gamer/bencher and im currently using a 64gb SSD and thats it. My big drives are in my server/guest pc. Idk of many people who actually play all 4 or 5 games they have installed at the same time. I play one at a time or i get confused.