Any use for Velociraptor (10000rpm) hard drive?

I need a good hard drive for loading Kontakt and VSTi samples quickly.

People here have been recommending 7200rpm SATA3 64mb cache hard drives for that (in particular the Western Digital Blacks). SSDs are obviously the best, but are way too expensive.

But what about 10000rpm drives like the Western Digital Velociraptor? Has anyone done a comparison between that and the WD Black, to see if there is any significant difference in speed between the two, when loading samples?

I can get a WD 600gb Velociraptor or a WD Black 2tb for the same price, just wondering which I should go for... size matters (my samples library is very big) but I'm willing to sacrifice some space for speed if the Velociraptor is a lot faster!

Yes I had an old Raptor 74gb that was very loud.
 
But the new Velociraptors make much less sound, because they are only 2.5" in size.
 
You can hear the difference in noise between a WD Black and a Velociraptor, as well as compare noise statistics with many other hard drive models, all here on this website:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1079-page6.html
The WD Black sounds significantly more noisy than the Velociraptor, on that webpage.

FWIW, The 10k RPM HDs have faster seek time... but that's not an issue for 99.9% of users.
 
Using 1TB drives:

• The WD HDs with 64MB cache sustain a little over 100MB/Sec
• The Seagate HDs with 64MB cache sustain 120-125MB/Sec
• Samsung HDs with 32MB cache sustain 125-130MB/Sec

 
SATA-III HDs (WD and Seagate with 64MB cache) are nowhere near saturating the SATA-II bus.
So... you'll achieve the exact same performance whether you connect them to a SATA-II or SATA-II controller.
This assumes that your total disk load isn't saturating the SATA-II bus.  Highly unlikley for most users...

Why is sustained transfer speed important? I thought it's random seek time that's important, for loading samples?

From my understanding of how Kontakt works, when you load up an instrument, it loads the very beginning portion of each sample file into memory. NOT the whole file. And each file is very small, it's not one big chunk like a video file. This is random seek behaviour. You can verify this, if it's a sustained read then a 100mb instrument loaded into RAM should only take 1 second, but in the case of Kontakt a 100mb instrument takes about 10 seconds to load - indicating random read behaviour.

See my post at the end of "Need advice on hard drive use" in the computer forum (this forum). I did a recap after all of the replies. I have a velociraptor drive (and an SSD). The drive is quiet, but louder than the quietest 7200 RPM drives. You can get it really quiet by mounting it in an o-ring suspension mount (sold on-line at quiet-PC sites). The new SSD drives with PCIe interface (OCZ Revo) are pretty fast in both read/write, but still expensive.
 

barrychap


See my post at the end of "Need advice on hard drive use" in the computer forum (this forum). I did a recap after all of the replies. I have a velociraptor drive (and an SSD). The drive is quiet, but louder than the quietest 7200 RPM drives. You can get it really quiet by mounting it in an o-ring suspension mount (sold on-line at quiet-PC sites). The new SSD drives with PCIe interface (OCZ Revo) are pretty fast in both read/write, but still expensive.
 

Yes I saw your post, but I notice that you didn't have any drive dedicated for samples. I guess you do mainly recording, and not much sampler work, I'm the other way around.
 
You have decided to use the Velociraptor for your OS drive, but I wonder whether it will be good as a samples drive, good means much better than a normal 5400rpm drive.
 
Also, regarding the Velociraptor noise, you can make it really quiet by removing the heat sink block, that's what silentpcreview did and the noise was significantly less. It will then be quieter than a WD Black 7200rpm.

Jim Roseberry

For conventional HDs, the 1TB Samsung F3 is a great choice...
2TB Seagate with 64MB cache is also very good
 
 

I think I saw you recommending 1tb Western Digital Black 64mb cache about half a year ago on this very forum, just wondering why you no longer recommend them? Do they have any problems?