- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
At another forum the failure rates of the 36GB versions were out of the roof. I said specifically the 36GB version. In fact, more than 1 in 10 were going the way of the buffalo [ie dying out]. That's poor for HD's. Very poor. Consider the current raptor, yes the 5-year warranty, the 130+ year MTBF is a bit outrageous...but they're telling you it will last. However, mine which has been used in my gaming rig for only 3 months has just failed - windows won't even load, telling me the disk is severely damaged. I'm in the process of replacing it...
I woudl like to point out that Windows loads for me used to take 20 seconds or more on my Seagate SATA drive. Come on, 5 seconds on the WD, are you telling me that isn't amazing? I noticed that suddenly my Half Life 2 load times, which, if any of you have played, are obnoxious, were seemingly cut in half. It has made a difference for me. My old drive had an 8MB cache, too. It seems like that wasn't the issue at hand improving my performance.
There is a difference. I won't lie at all - the WD Raptor 74GB version rocks. Bar-none, very awesome. True, it's 50% more expensive, give or take 10%, but you get what you pay for.
Might I ask why you didn't just ask your friend about this anyway...considering from what I've read it sounds like he does work with servers quite a bit. At any rate, you did come to b.net, and even though I may be one of the more knowledgeable ones here about pc's, I'm no HDD god. My area is generally with graphics cards and other things such as cooling and in general helping someone set up a pc.
I'm just starting my Junior year of high school. I picked up on stuff over the last 8 months, I've never taken a class or participated in any sort of job pertaining to pc's. This is a side thing for me.
Again, I wonder why you came here instead of going to him. I have learned a bit more, though. I guess my general thoughts of the servers I usually deal with, like the one at my school used in video yearbook or the one I have here at home, involve transferring files up to 2GB or even more at a time - when a large cache is nice. I should have been more specific and referenced to a large-file server, solely for accessing large files, not tapping quickly into a website or grabbing a document or two.
[Edited on 6/21/2005]