Get a Raptor, or stick with twin 7200s...

[exi]

I asked originally in another thread that went unanswered, but it's basically a hardware question anyway, so:

I've been itching to clean things up / reformat, but after reading so many rave reviews / first-person accounts on how great a 10,000rpm drive is, I was wondering if it's worth the $120. Somehow, I doubt it, but that's why I'm asking.

Current setup is two 160gb Maxtor SATA HDs, RAID 0 courtesy of Intel's ICH5 (and a third 80gb WD for backup only.) Would getting a 36.7gb Raptor be worth the money to have OS/Apps on that speed demon, and go from there? I get some awfully conflicting answers on that.

 

[Elbatrop1]

I dont think so. By having 2 drives in a hardware RADI0 config like that is plenty. I dont have any benchmarks to prove it, though

Also, another thing to give a slight boost in performance is to keep your page file on your backup drive, instead of your RAIDed drives (where, I assume, your OS is).

 

[AuThoRitY]

I dont know much about it but I've got 2 80gb's on RAID and they are each 7200rpm drives, so would that put me and 14400rpm or,,,, lol I'm not a huge fan of the whole RAID and Raptors, I dont know man... all I know is I was gonna get a raptor but my 2 raided 80gb's are running my gb's beautifully

 

[m3trj]

Raptors really are not worth the money, and RAID 0 doesn't give that much of a performance boost either. The raptor would probably be faster, but you'd hardly notice.

 

[exi]

Yeah, that was my next question.

I'm in the process of slipstreaming SP2 into the XP install, and even though I just downloaded the latest RAID drivers to include, I'm not sure if I should even do that. Two 7200 desktop drives ... I know the theoretical performance is there thanks to HD-Tach and common sense, but I don't know that it's even worth bothering with.

Of course, the added benefit is that this would be the chance to dual-boot with FC4, which is something I've been unable to do thanks to Anaconda not realizing the hard drive setup I have.

So, keep the volume or destroy it, leaving me with three individual HDDs?