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.

 

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

 

OS loading is all about small files. Why dont you image your OS and try both? If it was me I would pick the Raptor.

 

I would suspect the Raptor would be faster as an OS drive due to the lower seek time, but sadly you won't know unless you try both

 

I had the same dilema, i have 2 original raptors in RAID0 but i relented and ordered 2 500GB F3's to raid which are coming tomorrow.

 

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.

 

I went from a F1 to a VR and it cut 18 seconds off my boot time.

 

Damn, you must have a lot of stuff loading with your windows!

 

Going to short stroke my 2 F3's when i get them tomorrow to help the boot times.

 

Don't! Just partition.

 

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).

 

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!!!

 

Impressive! How do you ensure the data is on the outside of the platter?

 

By creating the partition you want to install windows in first.

 

Cheers Diablo and forgive my ignorance, but having created a partition resulting in say C:\ and D:\ drives, how do I know which is the outer platter?

Also, is 50Gb the sweet spot in achieving this effect?

 

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.