What Choice

[Kodiak]

If you had a choice of a sata 1 74gb Raptor 8cache or a sata 2 160gb seagate hd what would you prefer? Actually which is faster?

[slgrieb]

Personally, I most likely go with the 160GB Seagate. Raptors run warm because the high spin rate consumes a lot of juice, and my own experiences with Raptor reliability haven't been so hot.

Actually, I think mainstream drives today deliver equivalent performance to the older Raptors. In practical terms, the Raptor isn't going to deliver a noticeable performance boost. I'd think about buying a 500 GB -1 TB WD Caviar Black as an alternative though.

[Kodiak]

The raptors I have I have had for about 6 years I think. I had to rma one of them but they have been reliable so far. I was wondering because I just upgraded my system and was thinking of replacing the raptors soon if there was a performance increase in doing so.

[slgrieb]

6 years is plenty old enough to consider replacing a drive just from age. I think a 160GB Seagate would be comparable, but I still like the larger WD Caviar Black drives. Even setting aside issues like cache, the larger capacity drives tend to give you better performance than smaller drives, just because more data is likely to be stored where physical access is quicker.

[Ferrit]

I am on about my 4th or 5th raptor and its clunking now too .
NEVER EVER EVER EVER a WD again.
All they can say is, I guess you better RMA it.
Windows vista and 7 don't see any performance difference between a velociraptor or a normal seagate.
So any of the last 3 or 4 raptors have been warranty or I wouldn't have spent the money.

[Matridom]

I'll vote with ferrit on this one, i have 2 raptors, and 1 just died. I had a 600 gig WD die on my late last year. I've gotten dis-illusioned on them as a brand. I'm moving to Seagate for storage drives and picked up a pair OCZ SSD's to directly replace the raptors.

With newer technologies that are in modern hard drives, they are comparible to the raptors of old. your 160 gig seagate may not have them, but spend $80 on a modern 750-1tb drive and you will see similar performance compared to a single raptor.