Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Keep my Raptor as the OS drive or not?
I just built my New computer yesterday and so far its sweet. I was thinking of using the 1tb Caviar Black as a slave to keep the bulk of my games but keep the ones I play the most on the 80 gig raptor with the OS.
So I guess my question is, how much slower (if at all) is the Caviar black compared to a 1.5 SATA Raptor with 16mb cache?( I think thats how much it has). If I won't notice a much of a difference then I think I'll just stick with the black and use the raptor with my old system for a linux box or something.
Comments
From personal experience with my friends gaming rig that is set up this way, I'd have to say that except for booting and launching programs, you aren't going to notice much of a difference, if any, during game play.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
If that drive has a lot of hours on it, regardless of the make and model, I would just stick with the new drive.
That being said, the newer Caviar Black series is faster than the original Raptor series, even though it has a slower rotational speed. For a platter drive, the Black series is pretty spiffy without costing an arm and a leg.
Here are some screenshots of HD Tune benchmarks, these aren't on identical systems, but hard drive benches are going to be fairly similar no matter what system you have them installed in:
640G Caviar Black:
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/505210-wd-raptor-74gb-vs-wd-caviar.html
74G Raptor:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/5523-home-benchmarks-74gb-raptor-vs-150gb-raptor.html
A newer WD Caviar Black is probably faster than an older Raptor in sequential transfers. That's what happens with the passage of time, and increasing data density on a platter, so that you can see more data in one rotation. But sequential transfers don't matter that much. The smallest files in Ridelynn's link are 150 KB, which isn't exactly "small".
I'd be surprised if the newer WD Caviar Black and catch an older Raptor in random 4K read/write IOPS. I haven't seen any hard benchmarks to base this on, but 10000 RPM means that you don't have to sit and wait as long for a drive to spin to the right spot as 7200 RPM.
Depending on how old your old Raptor is, it may well be ready to run into reliability issues by now--far more so than it did when it was younger, I mean. Hard drives aren't meant to last forever, and the standard recommendation is to replace your hard drive every five years.
Your welcome to try to find benchmarks to support that conclusion, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Caviar Black wins even in small file Seek tests.
Sure, it rotates slower, but it has dual stage actuator (more precise/faster drive head positioning), dual controller processors, between 2 and 4x more cache, SATA2/3 support (which won't do much for seek time, but certainly won't hurt either), and much higher density per platter (which does greatly affect seek times, especially when coupled with dual stage actuator).
Now, I don't have any data to support that, but I'm just saying, I really wouldn't be surprised even with the slower rotational speed, especially when those small files turn up as cache hits because of the much larger cache.
As far as I know, the Caviar Black HDDs are faster than the Raptor HDDs. I usually use SSDs for my work but I have several systems with both these HDDs on. I think the Caviar Black is about 10% faster than the Raptor. Don't take my word for it, though. I'm an audio engineer/composer, I use high speed HDDs to stream samples from disk and for live play. Perhaps for my uses, the Caviar Black is more responsive. Anyway, cheers mate!
EDIT : It's possible that the Raptors in my system are of the older models.