Wd Raptor or Samsung F3 as boot disk?

Associate
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Hi Guys. I needed some more storage space so just bought a Samsung F3 1TB.

However I'm liking the reviews and considering making it my boot disk instead of my Raptor.

Does this sound a good idea, in that is it going to be faster at loading up Win 7 than the Raptor?

Cheers
 
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Raptors are faster, specially if you have velociraptor. But F3 have very high arial density with bigger cache, so it might be faster than old raptors, but not velociraptor.
 
Soldato
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only real difference will be seek times which the raptor has. The samsung will have quicker file throughput compaired to the raptor. so i'd say that the F3 will have an advantage
 
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Ok cheers guys. I guess i'll have to try both and see whats what. I dont imagine theres much between them, hence not being totally sure to begin with.

I did see this comparisson but for some reason despite having the Raptor in some tests they they havent compared it for the OS load times (or Crysis load times) which is a bit annoying.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/06/samsung-spinpoint-f3-1tb-review/1
 
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Caporegime
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I used to use 2 74gb 16mb cache raptors in raid0, they were certainly fast for the os and game loads, only problem was they were rather loud, eventually swapped to a samsung F1 320 gb as an os drive, prety decent drive as well but more importantly is much quieter.
 
Soldato
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This is the kind of performance a small windows partition will get if you make sure it's on the outside of the platter. (RAID0 2x500GB) The access time starts dropping off between 50 and 75GB (access was 8.8ms at 75GB partition).
bench.jpg
 
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Associate
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i tried the f1's and really the only major difference over the raptors was the noise - maybe in a lab or something it was slower but the silence tipped the bill - even velociraptor is quieter but still annoying. SSD's all the way! I think you'll be that impressed with the samsungs!!!
 
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This is the kind of performance a small windows partition will get if you make sure it's on the outside of the platter. (RAID0 2x500GB) The performance stays the same upto a 50GB partition then the access time starts dropping off between 50 and 75GB (access was 8.8ms at 75GB partition).

Impressive! How do you ensure the data is on the outside of the platter?
 
Soldato
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The disk management console will tell you the location of the partitions on the disk, left side of the bar is the outer edge right is inner edge.

Every model of drive is different some lose thoughput as soon as the head starts moving further in some like the F3 hold max performance for a while before the performance drops, on a F3 drive the max size of the partition with 2 drives in raid 0 without access speed drop is soome where between 50-75GB (8,1ms-8.8ms) i did'nt test in the middle, because i am only interested in creating a minimal partition for windows. The partition you could create before increased access delay is half the size with a single drive then 2 with 2 drives in raid0 because in raid0 you're spliting the partition between 2 drives.

The way i tested what i did was lock the RAID array to the desired size i wanted to simulate a simple partition if i had created just a partition i would'nt have been able to test what i had done because disk benchmark programs i have seen don't take any notice of partitions and read the entire disk.
 
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