74gb Raptors, toss or no?

[Sparkyy]

Currently looking to not upgrade but just a flat out new system, since my old one is still running agp, ddr etc etc. I do however have the first gen raptors, 74gb and had them in raid 0 for almost 3yrs with no glitches, issues or BSODs during that time. I decided to take them out out of RAID 0 to change my drives so I wasn't waiting on them to finish something.
Now with my new system, should I keep my WD740GD-00FLA0 drives and use them with my quad core I am planning on getting or look for just a 320gb drive and use that instead?
I know newer raptors are not much faster then the ones I own outside of NCQ and SATA II or 3.0Gbps or whatever it is. Should I just keep the two of them and get a 3rd drive for storage?
Any insight will help! Thanks for the input.

 

[DonDon]

Well, the first thing I would do is download the diagnostics from the WD website and give them a thorough checkup. Unless you have OEM drives, they still have 2 years of warranty on them. Swap them if the diagnostics give any hint of a problem.

Even the older ones are still smokin fast drives. If they are big enough for your OS and apps, anything you replace them with will only be maginally faster at best. If you are running Raid 0, I do recommend putting your data on a separate disk unless you backup regularly. Just because you have had good luck in the past.....

I am currently going through the same situation as you. My original system drive is a 15K scsi disk, but it is only 36 gig. I've been having space issues on it for the last year or so, so it is not nearly big enough to dual boot XP and Vista. I am going with a single Seagate 7200.11 drive. Not quite a Raptor, but with a 32 meg buffer and perp recording it is very fast and plenty of room to spread out. My data is kept on a 500 gig raid 1 NAS box that I backup to USB drives.

Don

 

[Sparkyy]

Yeah I broke up my array just so I could have my OS/Swap/Progs on the C drive, my second raptor deals with just my games and some Virtual PCs and then I have an old crappy IDE 40gb for downloads from newsgroups.

It works fine when I am doing anything like downloading and gaming I don't notice a slow down during loading sequences.
I figured though that my raptors now are still pretty decent even though they are 3 years old, might as well just look at a cheapest drive available and toss it in for storage then.

Thanks Don

 

[Brahmzy]

Love my 3 RAID0'd WD740ADFDs. Smokin' fast. All critical data's on a 4th drive that gets backed up to another box weekly. Best HDD config yet for me.... Hope do dump the Raptors for some SSD action soon...

 

[xxEIEIOxx]

I know newer raptors are not much faster then the ones I own outside of NCQ and SATA II or 3.0Gbps or whatever it is. Should I just keep the two of them and get a 3rd drive for storage?
Any insight will help! Thanks for the input.

FYI the raptors never went SATA II, they are still SATA 150. Not that it makes much difference, but so you know what you are dealing with. The do add NCQ though.