OT: just upgraded to a Raptor 10k disk drive

riredale wrote on 11/1/2006, 3:02 PM
About 2 months ago I rebuilt my system and went from an AMD XP2100 (1.67GHz) to my new 3800x2 chip. I've happily discovered that this chip effortlessly overclocks from stock 2GHz to 2.6GHz. I render into MPEG2 with CinemaCraft, which has always been a speedy yet very high quality encoder. Before, my render speed would be about 0.9 of realtime; now it's 3.9-4x. Remarkable.

Just yesterday I threw in a Western Digital Raptor 74GB drive to replace the WD120GB Caviar drive that was being used as the boot drive. The Raptor drive is cheap (~$140 from NewEgg) and spins at 10,000rpm, compared to 7,200rpm for the older drive. Once again, wow! The PC seems to have taken on a whole new aggressive personality, and stuff happens substantially faster than before. One thing, though--when the drive is moving the heads around, pulling data off the platters, it sounds like muffled hammering in there. The seeking noise level is slightly higher and definitely has more of an "edge."

Comments

Sunflux wrote on 11/1/2006, 3:33 PM
Yeah, I've been eying the speeds of those Raptor drives, but the size is a show stopper to me - 74gb or 136gb, even in a 4-drive RAID array, just isn't enough room for all the HDV footage I like to keep online.

I've got 1.2TB going right now, and I want more! :-)
fldave wrote on 11/1/2006, 4:05 PM
Raptor is great for boot drive. I got the 36GB almost a year ago. Very fast and solid. I only got the 36GB because the only thing that's on it is system and program files, my documents are kept on a separate drive completely. Plenty of room. Still only using about 14GB of it.

Some of the perceived speed increase could be a new XP install, although you say you rebuilt 2 months ago, not sure if that included a new XP install. If you just now reinstalled XP, then you may also be experiencing the true multiprocessor capability in XP.
FuTz wrote on 11/1/2006, 5:09 PM
fldave; you may be right, at least if I look at this thread (with excert)...

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=484992

excerpt:

"Subject: RE: HDV, Firewire, RAID and Ultimatte
Reply by: FuTz
Date: 9/24/2006 10:07:49 AM

I'm still not into HD at all but would 10K rpm drives improve something over 7.2K ones ?
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Subject: RE: HDV, Firewire, RAID and Ultimatte
Reply by: JohnnyRoy
Date: 9/24/2006 10:45:41 AM

> what is the best workflow procedure?

As farss said, same as DV now that Vegas 7 has considerably improved raw HDV performance on the timeline (it’s better than CineForm files). If you have a lot of tracks and you can’t get good playback performance, you still might want to use something like GearShift and work with proxies.

> I'm still not into HD at all but would 10K rpm drives improve something over 7.2K ones ?

Nope. I posted my findings at the bottom of the HDV page on my web site. The 10K drives cost 5.4x more and only give a 12% boost in read speed. My 500GB RAID of 7.2K drives costs me $200. A $500GB RAID of 10K drives would cost $1,097!!! Hardly worth it. I doubt you would feel a 12% difference.

~jr "

BUT: these drives have been gettin' cheaper since that topic ;)
UlfLaursen wrote on 11/3/2006, 11:05 AM
Hi,

I have 2 as bootdrives as well, and I like them too. I have heard here in Denamrk, that some people had problems with them breaking fast, but I have never had probs. with mine.

/Ulf