VelociRaptor or SSD

W

wildzcardz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 9, 2009
Messages
374
I am looking at a Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFSRTL 300GB to put a OS and use for gaming, but there seems to be a SSD craze and I do not know much about them. I would like to know what would be more beneficial for me, the WD VelociRapter or a SSD for my OS and gaming? Ane help would be worth while and maybe some reading material on SSDs too. Thank you.
 
Do a search on Anandtech for SSD's and you'll be brought up to date. I switched from a 300gb VR to an 80gb Intel X25-M G2 and it's not night and day, but the bump in speed is noticeable. For my own PC's I'll probably never use a rotational disk again. SSD's won't speed up gaming drastically, just a bit on level loads. OS loads and day to day use is where a SSD feels much nicer than a conventional disk.
 
I have a 80G 25X-M at home and a 300GB velociraptor at work. The 25X-M is much faster but too small for my needs (after the main OS install no room for VMs on the SSD) so I can not have all the stuff I need running fast on the SSD. While at work I have my OS + all of the data I need fast access times on the velociraptor.
 
I wouldn't invest too much in any SSD that wasn't Sata 3.0, just use a fast normal drive for a while until the SSDs make the transition.... and of course you'll need a system that can handle it, either new motherboard or a PCIe addon board with Sata III and USB 3.0.
 
Sounds good, it seems 50/50... call me weird but I am in the mix of building a HTPC for gaming and multimedia at the same time... SSD are pricey and what I would spend on a 300 raptor I dont get near enough room for price to space ratio... I will have a 1.5tb or 2 tb for my media such as movies and music... so I think we can close this thread and I will go with a raptor for now for my OS and game drive. Thanks alot guys.
 
wildzcardz said:
Sounds good, it seems 50/50... call me weird but I am in the mix of building a HTPC for gaming and multimedia at the same time... SSD are pricey and what I would spend on a 300 raptor I dont get near enough room for price to space ratio... I will have a 1.5tb or 2 tb for my media such as movies and music... so I think we can close this thread and I will go with a raptor for now for my OS and game drive. Thanks alot guys.
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You don't buy an SSD for space, you buy it for speed, and yes an SSD would smoke that VR hard drive in normal OS usage.
 
Both are great but there is a vast difference in $$$

So get whatever is best for the amount of money you want to spend.
 
i have 2 80gb velociraptors in raid 0. i dont need tons of space, i could prob get by with 80gb on the boot drive. would i notice much of a difference in speed in i went with something like the 80gb intel;? there is a big difference in wei points, mine is 6.2, the 80gb intel is 7.2, but i just cant picture the ssd being around 15% better in performance.
 
vanilla_guerilla said:
i have 2 80gb velociraptors in raid 0. i dont need tons of space, i could prob get by with 80gb on the boot drive. would i notice much of a difference in speed in i went with something like the 80gb intel;? there is a big difference in wei points, mine is 6.2, the 80gb intel is 7.2, but i just cant picture the ssd being around 15% better in performance.
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The VRs are decent in terms of read/write speed, but like someone else said in another thread think of it this way: your VRs have an access time of 6.2ms which is roughly 2x faster than most mechanical drives. The SSD has an access time of 0.1ms which is 62x faster than your VRs...that's where you'll notice a difference.
 
*Hugs returned RMA'd SSD*

I missed it so. Once you go SSD, you wont go back. It was hell going back to an HDD while I waited.

And I agree with the "You don't buy an SSD for space, you buy it for speed" remark. It's all about speed, not storage.
 
Little_4nic8er said:
*Hugs returned RMA'd SSD*

I missed it so. Once you go SSD, you wont go back. It was hell going back to an HDD while I waited.

And I agree with the "You don't buy an SSD for space, you buy it for speed" remark. It's all about speed, not storage.
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It's like buying a Ferrari. You don't get one for trunk space or gas mileage, you get it for SPEEEEEEEEED. :D
 
well all I wanted a ssd for is os and games only(for loading purposes)... All I do is for my pc is game, watch movies and surf the internet... so all my data saving, movies and music would be on another drive.
 
That's all I do, OS and a few select apps. 55GB (Of 74.5) is the fullest my SSD drive(s) has been when I first got it. Currently 24.7GB and my favourite apps working. Some, like TF2 are installed on my HDD. (Installed on the HDD Windows 7 install, that's been removed. I had not realized Steam/Steam apps worked without registry entries. Cool!)
 
VRaptors are a colossal waste of cash at this point. If you don't wanna invest in a SSD then just get a 640GB-1TB drive for a fraction of the price. If you don't multi-task enough or use heavy apps enough that you'd think you wouldn't notice the difference between a SSD and a HDD, then you're most definitely not gonna notice the difference between a VRaptor and a modern HDD (because the gap is way tinier than it is between HDD and SSD). A 640GB drive is like $60, any VRaptor will cost the same as a decent SSD... Do the math. There's been all sorts of specials lately too, the 60GB Agility drives were down to $130 AR recently.
 
Little_4nic8er said:
That's all I do, OS and a few select apps. 55GB (Of 74.5) is the fullest my SSD drive(s) has been when I first got it. Currently 24.7GB and my favourite apps working. Some, like TF2 are installed on my HDD. (Installed on the HDD Windows 7 install, that's been removed. I had not realized Steam/Steam apps worked without registry entries. Cool!)
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Look into using symbolic links, that way you can have only specific games from your Steam folder on the SSD and you don't have to decide between the whole folder or bust. It's real easy, super convenient.
 
xX_Jack_Carver_Xx said:
I wouldn't invest too much in any SSD that wasn't Sata 3.0, just use a fast normal drive for a while until the SSDs make the transition.... and of course you'll need a system that can handle it, either new motherboard or a PCIe addon board with Sata III and USB 3.0.
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Using UDMA33 with an SSD would be faster than a 15k SAS disk, for the function of the system drive.

System disk performance is about latency and IOps; not about throughput. While copy-tasks focus on throughput, the real performance comes from low latency random access; and that's where SSDs do 30-50MB/s and HDDs do 0.01MB/s - 0.5MB/s depending on benchmark; that's where the gain from SSDs comes from not their throughput.

Intel X25-M G2 has 75MB/s sequential write; lower than many modern HDDs. Still its almost hundred times as fast as random write IOps than the fastest HDD. So throughput doesn't matter, and you do not need the bandwidth of SATA 6Gbps.

What you will need, is the improved command queueing interface by the SATA 6Gbps standard; that will increase parallel operation by the SSDs so it increases overall performance.

Perhaps when SSDs are big enough (1TB) to act as mass-storage, will throughput be 'kind of' important; right now its not. Intel SSDs have pretty low throughput compared to other drives; but still blows away all competition in real benchmarks where random access is key.

Also consider all benchmarks are usually performed with clean installed OS, at the beginning of the HDD; that's the best possible setup for a HDD but it will quickly degrade over time as data becomes more fragmented; forcing more seeks and latencies go skyroof and IOps lower than 100 per second.
 
someone else said it, once you go SSD you won't want to go back.

Buy an 80 or whatever you can find a good deal on, put your OS and your most commonly used stuff, I have like 2 games, microsoft word and some other crap and the rest I have on 3 750gb wd blacks.

I love it and I'd hate to have to pull it out. Not to mention the other benefits that come with SSD that no one has talked about.
 
Agreed. Aside from speed, I don't hear my SSD and I don't worry about it dying on me.

Regarding the VR, I saw a test where better than VR speeds were achieved by short-stroking a large 1.5tb/2tb drive, so you may want to consider that.
 
I just tried short stroking my 1TB WD Black drive using the newest version of HD Tune(a software approach just for testing) and I used 300GB. Posted here are my results. You can find VR scores and compare yourself.
 
Short stroking does mean you cannot actively use the data beyond your small partition, or you'll lose the performance benefit and seeks take even longer. So it only works if the space after C: is not used, or is passive data (like backups) not accessed often.
 
Impulse said:
Look into using symbolic links, that way you can have only specific games from your Steam folder on the SSD and you don't have to decide between the whole folder or bust. It's real easy, super convenient.
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I have but I can't quite get my head around it.

Just seems simpler to install the few things I use regularly straight to the SSD. (Less work.) Though I could fill my 80GB SSD, I usually only have 1-3 games installed at a time. Plus a few other things, but most of it does not need to be on an SSD. (Monitoring software for example.)

P.S.

Got it all set up thanks for the suggestion.
 
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People over complicate the process of using symbolic links sometimes, usually because it suits some organizational scheme of their choosing. I just install all or most games by default to my HDD and then I move the directory of those I'm playing most often to the SSD, then I use a single symbolic link to tie it back to it's original location (as far as the OS is concerned). Keeps it real simple and hassle free... Maximum PC has a tutorial that follows a similarly simple procedure except I think they go in reverse (from a VRaptor to a larger HDD), again, it's a personal choice.
 
I don't understand the need to use symbolic linking as most software lets you change your install directory during the install process, so just change the standard C:\Program Files directory to D:\Program Files or to C:\HDD_files\ (drive mounted as folder)
 
The point of symbolic links is obviously to be able to move the game after it has been installed (w/o breaking the install); or in the case of stuff like Steam games, to be able to extricate it from the main Steam folder and run it off the SSD w/o having to move the entire Steam directory. What's not to get about that? Some people actually want to run some of their games off the SSD...
 
Impulse said:
People over complicate the process of using symbolic links sometimes, usually because it suits some organizational scheme of their choosing. I just install all or most games by default to my HDD and then I move the directory of those I'm playing most often to the SSD, then I use a single symbolic link to tie it back to it's original location (as far as the OS is concerned). Keeps it real simple and hassle free... Maximum PC has a tutorial that follows a similarly simple procedure except I think they go in reverse (from a VRaptor to a larger HDD), again, it's a personal choice.
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Yeah, I ran into trouble, but it was exactly that. Once I "walked away", played a game, and came back it all just worked after I started from scratch again.

I put TF2, and just the folder on the SSD. Dirt 2 as well. (4xxMB vs 10+GB :eek:)
 
Impulse said:
The point of symbolic links is obviously to be able to move the game after it has been installed (w/o breaking the install); or in the case of stuff like Steam games, to be able to extricate it from the main Steam folder and run it off the SSD w/o having to move the entire Steam directory. What's not to get about that? Some people actually want to run some of their games off the SSD...
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You are both making two different points, he is talking about games that aren't installed yet, and you are talking about games that are installed.

His approach works for fresh installs, your is better for stuff already installed with Steam being a prime example that you gave.
 
Makaveli@BETA said:
You are both making two different points, he is talking about games that aren't installed yet, and you are talking about games that are installed. His approach works for fresh installs, your is better for stuff already installed with Steam being a prime example that you gave.
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I realize that, but I thought he was trying to question the rationale of why anyone would want to move a game/app after it's been installed... And there's plenty of reasons for that.
 
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