Has anyone changed from a 10K RPM boot drive to a 7200 RPM boot drive?

[john dough]

I have a 150GB Raptor as my boot drive and I am getting close to filling it up (<10GB available). I would LOVE a larger Raptor drive (who wouldn't) but what else is a comparable fast drive for booting, that has a good amount of space (over 300 GB would be great).

If you did, was everything THAT slower? I have 9GB of RAM in my MacPro. I know that I can look at Bare Feats, but I want your experience, not someone else's.

Although it is not critical to do so today (I can park some old files for a while) I would like to do this within the next month.

[jdc]

barefeats only cares about one thing only: whatever is the fastest

so you really should be looking at barefeats...

and they will tell you the WD 640 gig drive is your best bet -- 2 320 gig platters read/write to each other faster

with only 10 gigs left, i would think just about any drive would be faster

[d0e]

Yeah with the pool of experience on this forum i like asking, another point of view never hurts. Did you notice much difference between the stock drive and the raptor, is the drive super loud being everything else is almost silent?
As to your question get another drive and off load some of your files to keep the boot drive lean. What about a second 150gi raptor set up as a raid?

[john dough]

[quote d0e]What about a second 150gi raptor set up as a raid?
No space left - I have 2 x 1TB and 1 x 750 in the other bays.

I think that I will get the 640GB, as that will alleviate the space issue.

[M A V I C]

I think you have too much on your boot drive. First key is to have the drive fairly empty. If you've got that much on your system, you might want to get a NAS or server or something.

For a boot drive, a Raptor is going to do very well compared to some of the other drives on the market. If you were dealing with large, contiguous files, the 10k drives or even 7.2k 1TB drives usually offer better performance than a Raptor.

Btw, have you benchmarked your machine with 8GB of RAM vs 9GB?

[hal]

do a search... samsung 32mb cache 1tb drives are WAY, WAY faster than the 150gb raptors.

[M A V I C]

[quote hal]do a search... samsung 32mb cache 1tb drives are WAY, WAY faster than the 150gb raptors.
Actually, for small files the raptors still win.

[JoeH]

They also win for random reads and writes to many small to medium file sizes. That rotational latency that is 28% less than for a 7200 RPM drive makes a big difference in that situation.

[Racer X]

this sounds a lot like old fashioned bench racing. Clear that boot drive off, and get on with your life. We are talking about what, a few minutes in an 8 hour work day?

[Mr645]

By another Raptor and RAID them.