Clah of the titans

[Boinker]

I'm in the process of saving money for a twin sli Core I7 set-up and I would like to know what hard drive is better for the system. Its going to be an Asus Supercomputer board, core i7 920 or 930, DDR3 1800 corsair, and 2 GTX480's.. Water-cooled of course.

Which hard drive would be a better hard drive to use for max speed. I understand I could get solid state but I am not so ready.

 

Please after you answer the poll back up a reason that I should choose what drive over the other. I would like as much information as I can.

 

Thank you in advance. Boinker

[IVIYTH0S]

Do they even still make the cheetah, I thought those drives were back in the scsi days?

[CowKing]

why not save some extra for an SSD; but if you don't want to save I would say the Velociraptor

[IVIYTH0S]

You can have mine, I dont see any difference between it and a modern 7200rpm drive. benchmarks can say the veloci is faster but even my laptop loads things just as fast while bein quieter, and even more so my dad's new HD

[Boinker]

Blast... ITs 50/50

[Hienrich Jager]

Well. I will try to break the tie if I can.

 

I know that I would go with a SSD, but barring that the Velociraptor is definately the winner in my eye.

 

I say this because as far as I know the only "Cheetah" branded hard drives are of the SCSI interface type. This would mean that you would need to get an additional add-in card to give you the SCSI capability with that motherboard. This add-in card will most likely require drivers during the windows install, so make sure you have a 3.5" handy or can slipstream them into your install CD.

Now, yes SCSI devices are fast, and have pretty dang impressive seek times. This is because they are enterprise level hardware and are expected to be able to read and write data very fast off of different areas of the platters efficiently. Enterprise level disks also have a lot of redundancy and error checking built in in order to maintain lots of up-time.

 

Now the Velociraptor is of the SATA interface. This means that the motherboard you are looking at will support this drive natively with no hassle. Yes there will not be quite as good of reliability seeing as it is not server hardware, but throughout the lifetime of the drive I seriously do not think that you would notice the difference. Yes it has slightly higher seek times, but if you are worried about seek times I would just go to a SSD and be done with it. (really though the higher seek times are still low compared with other traditional 7200RPM drives.

 

Basically, the tl;dr is that I do not think that you would notice a significant difference in terms of performance between the two during average gaming and/or file useage.

Now if this computer will be a file server, and about 20+ clients will be connecting to it all demanding lots of files, then go with the SCSI.

Otherwise I feel that you can get the level or performance that you are looking for for a lot less money and hassle with the Velociraptor.

 

Jager

 

P.S.: My gaming computer has a Velociraptor and it is awesome. Before that I did have a RAID 0 with 2x160GB Seagate Cheetah's built with used parts and it was nice, but a headache whenever i needed to reinstall windows or do anything in my case (that comparatively bulky 8-connection SCSI cable)

[Waco]

Neither. Both are wastes of money.

[tkrow21]

This beats both.

[IVIYTH0S]

Neither. Both are wastes of money.

Indeed, hence why I'll gladly offer mine up in an instant lmao