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Raptor Hard Drive, advice needed

R.Youden

R.Youden

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Apr 1, 2005
2,093
40
OK, I need some help here. I was looking at getting a general update for my G4 PowerMac spending around £200-250 on it. OK so I got Tiger on Ed discount, £60 gone. I will probably get another 512Mb of RAM, £40. That leaves me about £100 left to spend. I thought about another optical drive being a combo drive but that is a maybe (If I want to direct copy a CD I put it in my PowerBook and mount it via networking).

I already have two hard drives in my computer (2x120GB) but I saw there Raptor hard drives on the net. The are only small drives at 36GB but they run at 10,000rpm which is VERY fast. This is what I was thinking. If I put Tiger and my Applications on the Raptor drive will I notice a huge speed increase? I was thinking that I probably would, plus it leaves my other drives free for university work and MP3's and videos etc...

Anyone here used a Raptor and does my idea make sence?
 
My Friend just bought a raptor drive for his pc (the 70Gb version), you can see a big improvement in performance expecially in gaming (the games load up much faster!), I don't know if this will show as much difference on the mac, but you should see some improvement.
 
I have two of the 74 GB drives. They are damn fast. You will definitely notice short boot times and app launches.
 
daveL said:
I have two of the 74 GB drives. They are damn fast. You will definitely notice short boot times and app launches.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've only got one, but it kicks the crap out of every other drive I have ever used. It makes a clicking noise (like it's accessing something) every now and then, but I kind of like it. 74GB is faster than the 36...
 
Question is though: yeah, it might knock 10 seconds off booting or loading a large program, but what then? If you're like me, you reboot about once a week and apps are open pretty much all the time.

How much difference does the Raptor make during work -- once the apps are open?

It woudn't be worth the trouble to me just to have a quicker load time.

BV, your studio uses Raptors as scratch drives for Photoshop, right? How much difference does it make during your workflow?
 
CanadaRAM said:
Question is though: yeah, it might knock 10 seconds off booting or loading a large program, but what then? If you're like me, you reboot about once a week and apps are open pretty much all the time.

How much difference does the Raptor make during work -- once the apps are open?

It woudn't be worth the trouble to me just to have a quicker load time.

BV, your studio uses Raptors as scratch drives for Photoshop, right? How much difference does it make during your workflow?
Click to expand...
It really depends how your system set up. If the Raptors are your boot, then your swap space and temp directories (/private/tmp, /var/tmp) will also be on the drive, so any temporary files will be created/deleted on the drive; that alone can make a huge difference, if the apps you use rely heavily on temp files. As always, it depends.
 
CanadaRAM said:
BV, your studio uses Raptors as scratch drives for Photoshop, right? How much difference does it make during your workflow?
Click to expand...

74gb scratch & boot drives. We like them -- I'd have one at home in the dual 1.4 G4 if they weren't SATA.

Richard: I doubt that your G4 will take them as they are SATA drives.

I can't make any empirical statements on their qualities over 'vanilla' drives but the whole experience of using them makes using the work G5s seem very quick and smooth.

We're not that affected by their boot/app start-up uses as the Macs are left on 24/7 but on the occasional reboot that too happens very quickly.
 
Blue Velvet said:
Richard: I doubt that your G4 will take them as they are SATA drives.
Click to expand...
That's what I was thinking too. Unless you buy a Serial/ATA card, but you're still running off of the PCI bus. I think for the price it might be better to just get a larger P-ATA IDE hard drive, better video card, or more RAM. That'd be a better idea than the few extra seconds you'd get from the Raptors.
 
I have two 74 Raptors in Raid 0 in my PC. Even compared to the Seagates they replaced, they are crazy fast - especially noticeable in Photoshop and video encoding.
 
I thought that the SATA thing was an issue. I have seen the following article on a website selling a 73GB Raptor ATA-100 (which my comp uses) 10,000. Is that a typo on there part, or is that an old model? I take it that no one else makes ultra fast hard drives for ATA-100 then.
 
Richard Youden said:
I thought that the SATA thing was an issue. I have seen the following article on a website selling a 73GB Raptor ATA-100 (which my comp uses) 10,000. Is that a typo on there part, or is that an old model? I take it that no one else makes ultra fast hard drives for ATA-100 then.
Click to expand...

That is a typo, I'm afraid.
Sounds like you have the same Mac as me.

Either get a new video card or do what I did and spend some money making it quiet. Verax M10 + M11 kits have made using this Mac a far more pleasurable experience... I maxed the RAM to 2gb about 6 months ago.
 
While we are on the subject of the Western Digi Drives, how loud is the clicking noise? Would it be noticeable if say your Pmac was half a metre away and is it annoying or bearable?
 
Fredstar said:
While we are on the subject of the Western Digi Drives, how loud is the clicking noise? Would it be noticeable if say your Pmac was half a metre away and is it annoying or bearable?
Click to expand...

Depends on other background noise. Ours are in the work Macs and it's a noisy office with lots of people and machines with fans... I've never heard them at all.
 
Ah well, scrap the Raptor idea! I like the look of those cooling fans because it is very loud when I run it and it gets a bit annoying from time to time. Also is it worth the 2GB of RAM. I saw somewhere people saying that beyond 1GB you dont see any gains? Also is there an English site for the Veraz M10 + 11 as the only site I found was in German!
 
Richard Youden said:
Ah well, scrap the Raptor idea! I like the look of those cooling fans because it is very loud when I run it and it gets a bit annoying from time to time. Also is it worth the 2GB of RAM. I saw somewhere people saying that beyond 1GB you dont see any gains? Also is there an English site for the Veraz M10 + 11 as the only site I found was in German!
Click to expand...

This is where I got my fans from. The price has come down a bit too.
http://www.pcsilent.de/enpd_verax_macintosh_g4_quiet-veraxm10m11.asp

Installing them was a 3-4 hour job taken at a cautious pace -- it's a bit fiddly in places. Don't expect total silence but the difference was well worth it. This is where I first read about the Verax kits:
http://www.g4noise.com/

Maxed RAM? Well, why the hell not? :D
I thought the jump from 1 to 1.5 was def. noticeable and the 2 was more for completions sake...
 
I imagine that this would void a warrenty! How far can you go before voiding a warrenty on an expandable computer. OK new HD, more RAM, extra optical drive... but I imagine that this is a no no (bugger I have nearly 2 years left on my warrenty!)
 
Richard Youden said:
I imagine that this would void a warrenty! How far can you go before voiding a warrenty on an expandable computer. OK new HD, more RAM, extra optical drive... but I imagine that this is a no no (bugger I have nearly 2 years left on my warrenty!)
Click to expand...

Yes, this would void your warranty. There's a new heatsink to go over the processors and a custom fan-hood to go over that heatsink which directs the air straight out of the case. There are also replacement fans for the powersupply and the big fan that sits in the bottom of the case.

Even though I had 6 months remaining on my warranty, I threw caution to the wind and went ahead with it 'cos the noise was driving me up the wall. The racket made using iTunes pointless, except with closed-cup headphones...
 
I'm wondering if a pair of 74GB Raptors would be a problem with audio recording.
I've read mixed comments about noise issues.

Would I be that much better off with a stock 160 SATA
spending my money on 2 GB's of RAM?

I also wonder what happens if you run both a stock SATA drive
along with the faster Raptor.

Seems to me that you would want both drives to run at the same speed.


Just curious
 
Good thread.

I've been thinking about getting a Raptor 36GB for my boot drive. Why do people say the 74gb one is faster? Aren't they essentially the same drive?

Are they really noisy? Or about the same as my stock 160gb seagate?

Any response will be thanked!

SpaceMagic
 
SpaceMagic said:
Good thread.

I've been thinking about getting a Raptor 36GB for my boot drive. Why do people say the 74gb one is faster? Aren't they essentially the same drive?

Are they really noisy? Or about the same as my stock 160gb seagate?

Any response will be thanked!

SpaceMagic
Click to expand...

Space- here's some reference for you-

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040123/wd740-05.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041116/command_queuing-02.html

I pointed you to specific pages, but you can read the whole article of course!
:)
 
SpaceMagic said:
Good thread.

I've been thinking about getting a Raptor 36GB for my boot drive. Why do people say the 74gb one is faster? Aren't they essentially the same drive?

Are they really noisy? Or about the same as my stock 160gb seagate?

Any response will be thanked!

SpaceMagic
Click to expand...

The 74s are 2nd Gen. Raptors and use Tagged Command Queuing while the 36s don't - much faster.

My Raid0 Raptors are very noisy, heard even over my 6 fans. When I defragment (I know - no worry for a mac user) I have to leave the room, sounds like the things gonna blow up! :eek:

I have a SATA Seagate 160 for data storage and it is whisper quiet by comparison. Personally, I would never trust storing files on a Raid0. I have XP and Apps on the Raid where I get the performance gains and store on other drives.
 
Thanks for replies. Hopefully this helps Richard too.

I'm thinking of getting the 74Gb ones but they cost so much! I mean over £100 for a 74gb hard disk is unbelievable!
 
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