Hey Everybody,
Well I've really been looking at raptor hd's here lately since I'm planning on building a C2D system within the next couple of weeks. Here's what I'll be using it for:

Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Audition
F.E.A.R.
Battlefield 2
Half Life 2
Crysis (Hopefully)
General Computing

So I do a good bit of video editing, and a good bit of gaming. I'm looking for a way to boost my system performance when I build it. Here's what I'm looking to get:
Intel E6400 (Unless the E6600 drops to 280)
Abit AW9D
2 Gigs Patriot DDR2 800mhz Ram

I already have:
Geforce 7800 GT
2 x 320gig Seagate Barracuda drives

What do you think? How much performance will I really see in video editing, windows performance, and gaming if I purchase one of these expensive hd's? Its a lot of money to spend on a hard-drive, so I want to make sure I'm doing the right thing. Thanks for your help!

HDD's are all about loading times when it comes to performance. Raptors (and there respective competition from Seagate, Hitachi, etc.) will load videos, Windows, photos, game levels, and other files faster because they run at 10,000 RPM. But performance when editing photos and video will not increase, nor will your framerate (these depend on RAM, CPU, and video card). Check the THG HDD charts to see what performance is at stake here.

here's a review about raptor from tom's article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] ance_lead/

First i vote a big YES to getting it for your uses.

second, I don't know what sites you are checking but newegg has the e6600 for 320 (last i checked, when i bought mine at least) and well out of the box, not changing the cpu fan or anything i'm at 3ghz stable and under 38 C. So i think for the extra $40 (compared to your 280 limit) its well worth it, you will get at least another year out of the computer knowing you can oc it an extra 600 mhz (per core, 1200mhz effective) whenever you feel like (if not more since you've got ddr 800 memory).

Good luck buddy.

Currently, there are no faster SATA drives other than the Raptor series...

is there any rumour regarding new hdd with a leap performance boost in the near future?

i mean if there will be one soon, than it's worth waiting.

Buy a Mac Pro (Intel based) and never look back. M$ junk is exactly that, junk. Medicore M$ at best -- install Boot camp on a Mac Pro and you have 100% compatibility with all the M$ junk.

If your serious about Digital Audio/Video editing the Mac Pro is the ONLY way to go.

Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro-- plug my HD camcorder into the firewire port and I'm cutting SD DVDs and HD-DVDs in a matter of minutes. Try to do this on a WinXP box -- after multiple prompts and start/stop stutters as you figure out what to turn off, you'll wish there was an easier way...And there is... a Mac Pro.

Just do it. Use your consumer $$$ to tell M$ what you really think of their mediocore OS.

Rob.

Well, he does edit videos, so a Mac would help him there...except he mentioned gaming first. And you can't play FEAR or FarCry on a Mac, due to a lack of video driver support. You might be able to, but it's better to get one computer that can do it all. And a PC can edit videos very well, especially with a C2D.

I vote Raptor, but only if you can afford it without sacrificing your video card, RAM, PSU, or CPU. It's nice to have, but I'd rather have a better system otherwise, and have a Raptor be the icing on the cake.

It's certainly the icing on my cake...

It's called Boot Camp for the Mac Pro which allows you to run 100% compatibly WinXP or Vista. Notice "Mac Pro" that is the key as they are all Intel based. You can run anything on the Mac Pro if you install Boot Camp correctly and use the Mac Pro drivers that apple provide (which just come from Intel anyway).

The only option you need to get when ordering the Mac Pro is to get the ATI X1900XT video card -- games like FEAR, FarCry, etc. etc. will run VERY well on the Mac Pro. Games like Quake 4 or any based on the Quake 4 engine will run even better since they make use of the 4 CPUs that comes with the Mac Pro.

I have an SATA Raptor working very well in my WinXP PC and in my Mac Pro -- great drive!

Rob

Yes, I am aware of Boot Camp. But, it's not 100% compatible, as I hear. And he'll still need to dual boot. I still say a PC is the better option.

I have Boot Camp -- so far there isn't a single game that has not worked and worked very well. Dual boot option is very simple, you get a picture of two hard drives -- one a Macintosh HD and the other a Windows XP - you select the OS you want to boot into. It is 100% compatible, any "issues" will be the same issues one has on the Windows platform. Boot camp is NOT an emulator.

Sure WinXP can do video editing and it can games too. Same with the Mac Pro only you get 4 Intel Core 2 Xeon CPUs and you can run Final Cut Pro which is still top dog for video/audio editing. Seems to me the best of both worlds in a Mac Pro. Also, the Mac's 30" LCD and dual link DVI is the only monitor I'm aware off that can run games at insane resolutions without having display problems (Dell's 30" just can't do games well, the Mac 30" HD can).

Since the Mac Pro sports PCI-E, there could me more video card options soon if ATI X1900XT isn't good enough. You could even run nVidia high end cards if you like.

The Mac Pro isn't like any prior Mac and is considerably faster than the G5 quad -- I mean, it's all Intel -- may as well stick a sticker on the case which says "Intel inside".

Rob.

Perpindicular recording has potential to speed up performance and density, and flash drives are expensive along with iRAM cards...

The hard drive industry does not move nearly as fast as the video, memory and CPU technology does, they move more incrementely...

The Raptor has for the last couple years and probably will continue being king of the hill for a while to come...

Macs are excellent if all he does is do video editing. I use a Mac at school. But I sometimes wish we had PCs there, since the Mac programs sometimes glitch and we got to Force Quit programs and we forget to save. Macs are cool cause you can manipulate pictures and video as if they were modelling clay. Vista is going to have a lot of Mac features. But if Macs were to become just as popular around the world as the PC, they'd be just as infested as PCs. They don't focus much on security now as Windows does.

With a PC you have upgradability options. Sure it's complicated and bloated like the guy representing the PC in the Mac commercial. But it's because that bloated guy has been enjoying his ice cream and sweets. The skinnier guy on his right hasn't had a whole lot of experience with fine dining... lol where am I going with this?

Instead of talking about mac's I'll try to get back on topic for you and say that for all majority of the things you will be doing you will not notice that big of a diffrence, only compared when the drives are going to be in raid 0 If you are running them seperatly or singly you might notice some difference. I currently run 2 80 gig Western Digital SataII drives in raid 0 and they are sick by themselves. they Test out on sandra 5Mb/s slower than the raptors in RAID 0 so i cant say that 5 MB/s will be that noticible.
I personally would reccomend 2 drives you like (company wise) segate and wester digital have been the best for me, as per reliability and warranty issues when they arrise, but it dosent really matter, and put them in RAID 0 for the best bang for the buck, Im not sure on prices at the moment but, its probably cheaper to buy 4 and raid them all together in raid 0 and have an insane amount of bandwidth to use than the raptors.
Sorry to drag this on so long lol

Since the subject has already gone way off track..
There are some hilarious "Mac vs. PC" videos on YouTube and Google Video.

Worth checking out!

Well... Microsoft is pushing manufacturers to build hybrid drives with a couple gigs of Flash memory for Vista, you may see some load time increases from that for Windows, and supposedly WIndows will store often used items there form what I've read. Other than that there is nothing too exciting, "perpindicular" drives may increase the read speed once the data is located (due to increased density) but do nothing to speed access times which is the main performance hit. There prettymuch isn't anything hard drive makers can do to boost performance other than make faster spinning drives, and Flash has numerous problems for common use (cost, limited number of writes is less of an issue for things other than the page file).

Like other posters have said Raptor's will improve your load times (including page file access if it is on the Raptor) and time to save to the disk, however outside of those events hard drives cannot boost performance (having tons of RAM is better than getting a Raptor IMO as keeping data in memory is the key to better performance for most applications).

That's a given. Having a Raptor will only make a kickass system more kickass. They won't be a godsend to a less kickass system.

For videos, RAID helps. So if you're going Raptor, get two and stripe RAID them, and have a massive drive as backup where you save your stuff at the end of the day.

last time i checked ppl built their own pc because its cheaper to do so. buying a mac isnt cheap. and i use my Raptor to run programs off. It is a minor difference though.

On a side note: I have a raptor (with a perpendicular seagate 7200.10 as my data drive), and love the fast disk access. Has anyone got experience of going from 1 raptor to 2 raptors in raid 0? Would I notice a big difference?