Anyone using Raptor drives?

Time to build a new machine - the old P4 1.6 day's are numbered.

Most people seem to be talking about 7200rpm IDE drives for music - but a local PC builder has suggested Raptor drives. These are supposed to be faster than SATA (and friends with SATA drives seem impressed with SATA). Apart from going SCSI, Raptor drives seem to be very interesting.

I've always considered C: to be for OS and programs, and to use seperate drives for audio and for samples. This guy I was talking to said that the speed of C: is everything, and the other drives are not as important.

Since Raptor drives seem to be fairly small (compared to IDE bulk capacity) - would it make sense to have a Raptor C: and IDE audio and sample drives?

I use some huge sample libraries - like the Vintaudio Yamaha C7. I use an external USB2 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda 300 gig, which is barely capable. It hadn't occurred to me that the speed of C: could make a difference. The disk meter in SX shows very little activity - but that's practically useless.

I suppose I could use 3 Raptor drives, and just use the external ones for offline storage.

Kiwiburger, I can't answer any PC-specific questions; but I use a Raptor drive exclusively for streaming my East West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra Platinum Edition sample library on my dual 2.5 GHz Mac G5, and I'm very happy with it!

Best,

Geoff

Raptors are SATA drives and the fastest out there currently. They spin at 10k and therefore their access times are faster and that is what you want for recording. I have not used them for audio yet (I use SCSI) but we use them for our FEA software at work because of their speed. They really do make a difference over standard SATA or IDE's and are the next best thing to SCSI. As for C drive being an issue, this is not really true. Your audio drive is the one doing the reading and writing and it needs the speed. You need to keep in mind though a lot of SATA's are running on patched IDE boards, not true SATA, so you need a native SATA connection and cables to get the benefits of SATA. You should also run a SATA for the C drive but it's not neccessary for it to be a Raptor. You can offload work to a slower and larger drive. I do this so I can reformat my audio drive so it doesn't get all fragmented. Defrag doesn't really help audio too much because it just packs files together not necessarily in any order that helps performance when reading multiple files.

Thanks Geoff & BrainChild. Some very good points there, Cheers.

Actually, that's not true. It's called defragmentation from a reason. A fragmented file is one that is located in various spots on the disk. Defragmenting rewrites the file in contiguous clusters on the disk so that it doesn't have to do seeks to other parts of the disk which slows down reads.

A fragmented disk doesn't matter when recording, but it does matter for reading.

I think this point is very valid. If you were simply streaming one audio track, I agree that defragging is logical.

But if you are streaming a complex multi-track, compiled from various takes - then obviously the disk head is hunting and pecking from all over the disk. No matter how neatly defragged that drive is, it's not going to make much difference ...

What's the Raptor drive has the largest data capacity? The highest I've seen so far is 74Gb. Anything larger?