Fairly disappointed with Raptor WD360

[goomba_1]

When I went from 5400 RPM drive to my first IBM 7200, it was like a revelation! Everything loaded so fast and correctly... it was amazing. Wanting to relive that, and hearing nothing but good things about WD drives with 8MB cache, I took the plunge and bought a Raptor.

Its not a huge jump in speed like I thought. I notice some things are faster, adaware scans + formats + defragments, but nothing else seems to have a huge speed boost. Games are doing a bit better but I can't tell the difference between loading them on my Raptor or a Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drive on this system (Pentium 3.2 ghz, PC3500 RAM) Windows XP loads take the same time as on a Seagate (3 passes of the blue scroll bar on the startup screen)

What am I missing to make this drive so good?

 

[xonik]

I think you'll need a stopwatch in order to appreciate the Raptor's utility in games. Sound like fun?

You'll notice the speed when transferring large files around. Barring video editing activities, it's not that great of a speed boost.

 

[DiscoStu]

i dunno, i think its more psychological then anything for most people ... it dosent seem any faster then my 120 gig SE's but man i sure do like thinking it does ... maybe cause they are loud or something

heh joking aside, ive noticed the biggest gains when dealing with large files ... i think the majority of people that own these drives have them in a RAID array ... perhaps thats where you're missing out ...

 

[xxaaqq]

I hear differing opinions, one being that the Raptor alone is more of a performance upgrade than running 2 7200RPM drives in Raid 0. Well, I'm running Raid 0, and I think it's a ton faster for loading game levels. I went from one hard drive to Raid 0, and played NFSU with both setups, and the difference in loading is huge. It's almost instaneous now.