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Building The Ultimate PC for FSX - Hard Drives

Hard Drives = 2 x Western Digital Raptor’s 150GB 10,000RPM in RAID 0

My Opinion

I started looking around for the perfect hard drive, I was surprised how little things had changed over the years. For me, there was one hard drive that stood above all others and I had to have it.

Choosing the 150GB Western Digital Raptors was an easy decision to make. For years, I have used with great success Western Digitals 74GB Raptors without the problems that I have found in Hard Disks of other types and brands. Both Seagate and Western Digital don’t seem to put the same emphasis on quality into their SATA2 7,200 RPM hard drives and it shows in their reliability.
Frustrating failures and degrading performance were once common aspects of early SATA2 hard drives.

With all products, you will have the odd lemon and the Western Digitals Raptor range of hard drives is not immune to manufacturing gremlins but in my experience they perform rock solid for longer periods of time. When you’re that unlucky owner of a faulty hard drive its frustrating when you spend so much time setting up your system only to have it fail after a few months. Loosing all your saved data and having to start the process over again. Sure the manufacturer will either give you a new hard drive or your money back. But it can take months for you to receive a replacement hard drive and I personally hate the suspicious look on a company salesman’s face when you ask for your money back. The items lost can be personal and irreplaceable such as digital photos or letters from loved ones. There is nothing most warranty department can do to replacing lost data. For those of us that have been around for a while we know the frustrations well and there is a good chance that we have all had at least one failure of a hard drive since we started using PC’s for every day use.

The Raptor group of hard drives has consistently been reliable for many years after purchase and the Western Digital Raptors come with a 5-year warranty. Given the nature of storage and the internet, this is becoming more and more important to the average PC user. Personal details are being stored on computers more than ever before and companies need reliability to ensure there wont be any negative impact on there customers through downtime. The financial impact of system failures in a hard drive can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Even humble user’s of this website would be devastated to lose their registration information of their favorite online products. Imagine losing your registration details to the up and coming FTX. Information of this nature can be hard to recover from a damaged disk and some companies in the interest of protecting their product will give you a hard time when you contact them for help (HL2 Steam comes to mind).

Below I will try to explain why I continue to chose Western Digital Raptors in a little detail and offer my advice on the best way to use them for performance-based application. This article and the group of articles as a whole are intended for the beginner to average user. If you would like detailed information, feel free to email me directly.

So what is the difference?

While the gap between high end Western Digital Raptors and SATA2 hard drives has narrowed slightly, there is still a 10-30% performance advantages in Editing, Gaming, Business and Server applications. If you intend to use your computer primarily for word processing or internet browsing then you will see little benefit in owning a Western Digital Raptor. Your hard-earned money could be better-spent upgrading memory or some other PC component instead. However, because this is a Gaming website I am going to assume you want the best from your PC to make games like FSX and Crysis perform the way designers intended for you to see and enjoy them.

Let’s do a basic comparison with the Western Digital 150GB Raptor and the latest SATA 2 Hard Drive from the same manufacturer. The reason I chose the same manufacturer is that companies like to use many of the same parts in their products to reduce costs and keep the manufacturing process as simple as possible. Crucial components like the products firmware, software, spindles, bearings and covers stay roughly the same. For the purpose of this comparison, it means we can discount most of the arguments of software and hardware differences when it comes to comparing performance between products.

I have copied some crucial details from the Western Digital websites to highlight some basic differences.

Western Digital 150 GB Raptor
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=189&language=en#jump11

Rotational Speed 10,000 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 16 MB
Average Latency 2.99 ms (nominal)
Start/Stop Cycles 20,000 minimum

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 4.6 ms
Write Seek Time 5.2 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 0.4 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 10.2 ms (average)

Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 1.5 Gb/s (Max)
Transfer Rate (Buffer To Disk)

Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 150,039 MB
Capacity 150 GB
Interface SATA 1.5 Gb/s
User Sectors Per Drive 293,046,768

Western Digital 750 GB RE2 h
ttp://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=335&language=en

Rotational Speed 7,200 RPM (nominal)
Buffer Size 16 MB
Average Latency 4.20 ms (nominal)
Start/Stop Cycles 50,000 minimum

Seek Times
Read Seek Time 8.9 ms
Write Seek Time 9.6 ms (average)
Track-To-Track Seek Time 0.6 ms (average)
Full Stroke Seek 21.0 ms (average)

Transfer Rates
Buffer To Host (Serial ATA) 3 Gb/s (Max)
Transfer Rate (Buffer To Disk) 98 MB/s (Sustained)

Physical Specifications
Formatted Capacity 750,156 MB
Capacity 750 GB
Interface SATA 3 Gb/s
User Sectors Per Drive

At a glance the basic comparisons show that apart from the Buffer Size of 16mb’s, almost all other comparisons indicate that Raptors have up to a 50% advantage in performance compared to the RE2 750GB. However, this can be a little deceptive, the larger size of the RE2 750 GB hard drives would of course take longer because they have a higher volume capacity in some of the examples shown. These comparisons would reflect closer figures if the RE2’s were tested on the first 150 GB’s of the HD but I’m not going to perform that test for you today. We will just keep that in mind when considering both hard drives. Another thing to keep in mind is that the fastest part of your hard drive is on the inside of the spindle. This would also influence the accuracy of the readings in any comparison between the two hard drives. Even with the limitations in mind you can see that it would not make up the full 50% difference. The key indicator that proves my theory is the “average latency” benchmark as provided by Western Digital in the performance information above. The difference between these two comparisons reflects a more accurate performance benchmark.

Some other common limitations are a hard drives rotational latency. Because a hard drive's disk platters are continuously spinning, when the I/O request arrives it is highly unlikely that the platter will be at exactly the right point in its rotation necessary to access the desired sector. Therefore, even if the rest of the drive is ready to access that sector, it is necessary for everything to wait while the platter rotates, bringing the desired sector into position under the read/write head. The benefit of having a hard drive that spins 30% faster is obvious in that it reduces the rotational latency timings. Add a second hard drive in RAID 0, like those that I have and you then get more than a 60% reduction in theoretical latency timing.

Lets look at what the Western Digital Raptors do best for a minute. With 10,000 RPM over a smaller drive space capacity the Western Digital Raptors have unmatched Reading and Writing capabilities. For gamers like us this can make huge differences to the performance of the games we play. Such as Flight Simulator X, Like I have said many times before FSX is a massive game requiring huge amounts of PC power to perform at its best. Just the size of the FSX folder alone is formidable and I know of no other game that takes up more that 18 GB’s of my hard drives. Granted I have a few add-ons that further increase the size of that FSX folder but this only highlights the performance benefits and necessities of a Raptor hard drive even more. The extra speed you get with Raptors will improve the time it takes for FSX to find and access the numerous and varied types of data spread across large parts of your hard drive. You will notice decreases in loading times meaning your in the air much faster than someone with a lesser hard drive. The transition between scenery when using items like time advance will no longer take minutes to load and destroying the sense of realism for you. Those large and detailed pay-ware aircraft such as the FSX PMDG 747 can take up to 5 minutes to load on a lesser PC and the hard drive you choose can have a huge impact on reducing that time frame. With a set of raptors on board you won’t be sitting there for long especially if your other PC specifications are similar to mine.

This article however assumes that you know how to keep your hard drives from getting too fragmented. For those of you that don’t know what I’m talking about and would like formatting and defragging explained in a little bit more detail drop me an email and I will explain further because its important that everyone should have and know these skills to maintain their PC.

When considering the instillation of FSX I recommend you do what I do and make FSX the first game you install after a fresh format of windows. This ensures it’s as close to the center of the hard drive as possible and you will benefit from the hard drives mechanical parts not needing to travel as far to access the information your PC is requesting. This will all contribute to the over all speed of the applications within that first segment of your hard drives.

From the very beginning, after a format and full windows instillation I perform regular de-frag’s to keep both windows and FSX tucked up nice and tight on the inner circle of my hard drives. I do however recommend that you install all your FSX updates and add-ons after you first defrag windows. Its important that windows has been defragged before you start the instillation so there are no holes for FSX to fall into when you install FSX for the first time.

Windows is problematic at the best of times so don’t even think about defragging windows until you’re happy with your windows instillation. Once windows has been installed and fully updated with the latest patches and service packs from both Microsoft’s website and your hardware vendors, you will be ready to install FSX and her add-ons. Perform your first defrag at this point to avoid any trouble and to take full advantage of patch updates released by Microsoft to fix some of the many issues they have with the de-fragmentation process. After FSX has been installed and fully updated your ready to run you second defrag and once this is complete you should be left with two very large but stable and intact sectors on your hard drive close to the center for optimal performance. One last recommendation, don’t use third part defragmentation software on windows Vista. The latest products are not up to scratch and in my case they have destroyed data and caused many head aches along the way from trying to fix the mess they make.

The combination of 10,000 RPM and 16mb’s of Buffering Cache mean there is ample room in the pipes for the information to flow freely to whatever programs you are running. The Read/Write speeds of my Western Digital Raptor’s, mean the hard drives will be waiting for the CPU and RAM to catch up, not the other way around. This is beneficial because the CPU and Ram sectors of your computer need more resources to draw from in the attempt to process and off load the information to relevant parts of the computer. Unlike hard drives, when CPU’s and memory sectors of your PC reach 100% of there capability the resulting choke of information can be catastrophic and your system may lose data and your computer will freeze. Your hard drives on the other hand can run at 100% for some time with no catastrophic impact on your PC.

Two Is better than one.

There are benefits in having more than one hard drive in your PC and the benefits are greater still when those hard drives are Western Digital Raptors. With the aid of onboard RAID devices, for some time now we have been able to link hard drives for either improved performance or redundancy and security in the event of a failure. There are several RAID functions available to most people via there BIOS. RAID 1 forces the computer to consider all hard drives as individual copies and does not increase performance but redundancy is increased because the information on the first hard drive is mirrored on the second. This setup is perfect for protecting your data and in the event of a system hard drive failure you will be able to quickly recover. RAID 0 is the setup of choice for performance users like my self. RAID 0 forces the computer to consider 2 or more hard drives as one drive. When data is written to a RAID 0 array the information is split in half and simultaneously written to both hard drives. Effectively doubling the performance and potentially halving the read/write access speeds from the combined setup. The last setup I will mention is RAID 10 commonly used in server situations and business applications. RAID 10 is at least a 4 hard drive setup. This provides a combination of the performance of RAID 0 and the security of having all your data backed up onto the second virtual array while linking them so the computer uses them as if its one hard drive.. Should any of your hard drives fail your data is not lost and the network of hard drives can be recovered easily.

Because RAID 0 makes the computer think that two hard drives are actually one. We can see substantial increases in performance as soon as you install windows for the first time. Windows for years has reported on the estimated time it will take to install. With two Western Digital Raptor hard drives in RAID 0, Windows Vista instillations go from 45 minutes of boredom to an 11-minute sprint just by changing the BIOS setup before re-installing windows. Be warned though only attempt this if you have read the relevant material and understand what this will mean for your PC. Jumping into this setup without fully understanding the process could lead to the loss of all your saved data on both disks that will only be recoverable by experienced PC users or your local IT service provider.

So its easy to see how your computer will greatly benefit from not only Raptors but a RAID 0 combination. You will gain large advantages in performance in your two-fold ability to read and write data simultaneously in larger quantities. The benefit to games like FSX will be that they are spread out and installed even closer to the center of both disks further enhancing the performance already gained by doubling your Read/Write capabilities.

The down side.

All this performance comes at a cost and for some people the cost will be too high. Like a finely tuned V8 racecar, the extra performance you get from the 150GB Raptors will cost you with increased noise levels coming from your computer. The noise factor is a big downside for many people, especially those that use their computer for quiet tasks like surfing or word processing. The noise generated can be distracting in a quiet environment and compared to a 7,200-RPM hard drive the raptor makes at least 50% more noise. Western Digital has worked hard to improve noise levels. With every new revision, the noise produced by their hard drives has been reduced.

There are things you can do about excess noise coming from your PC. There are many products on the market dedicated to reducing the impact noise has on our ears. One such solution is buffeting your hard drives with a foam or polyurethane lining between the chassis or your hard drives and case. You can also purchase from your local Bunnings store, small rubber gaskets to cushion any noise generated by the gaps and vibration you find between the screws that hold your hard drives in place. Some case manufacturers incorporate plastic hard drive housings and polyurethane case lining the help reduce noise as well. All are very cheap and effective solutions to your noise problem and all can be installed with little mechanical knowledge. The Antec P190 case I have installed all these components in has outstanding noise abatement qualities.

The second draw back is the capacity for storage on the Raptor hard drives. Because these hard drives are built for speed, they are trimmed down like a high performance motor car to improve performance. Today’s media and software is larger than ever before because of digitalization. Digital media such as HD-DVD’s, Music and games take up far more space on your hard drive than they used to and as such I would not recommend using Raptors as a primary means of storage for these types of media. Hard drives like the Western Digital 750GB RE2 will give you far better storage capacity for roughly the same price and they will perform the task of running the media well enough in most applications with the exception of games. I prefer a combination setup and in my case, I use a 750GB external hard drive to compliment the storage capacity of my over all system. Everything of value to me is backed up onto the external hard drive so I can take it with me when I work away and plug it into my laptop. Even though two Raptors in RAID 0 give me 300GB’s I do my best to keep my main hard drives trim and I use less than 120GB’s in total. I suggest you do the same.

Healthy hard drives.

It’s important to ensure you never fill your hard drives past 70%. There must always be free space on your primary windows hard drive in order for your computer to run smoothly. Windows utilizes free space on a hard drive to create system recovery, virtual memory and page filing sectors. Free sectors will be used by windows for the temporary storage of data and to back up critical information should your computer fail or crash in some way. The closer you get to filling up your hard drives the longer it takes them to do their job. One other thing to note is that windows won’t allow you to defragment your computer any more if you don’t have enough free space available. This is a good indication to you that you need to trim some fat and store your data in another location.

Scan disk, some people swear by scan disk and use it as a early warning tool in the prevention and detection of future hard drive failures. I however have had bad experiences with scan disk and I think scan disk is part of what causes these hard drives to fail. Never interrupt a scan disk scan even if you think it has stopped responding. The last time I did this my hard drives were destroyed and I lost large amounts of valuable data. I left scan disk running for two days because of previous failures when I attempted to interrupt a suspected hang in the scan. The hard drives still wouldn’t come back to me and I lost those hard disks as well. To date scan disk has been responsible for at least four hard drive failures that I have no doubt were the result of a failed scans and poor software design. Windows in my opinion has a long way to go before I will trust scan disk with the responsibility of checking my drives for physical errors. I would suggest you avoid scan disk and just accept that your hard drive might fail one day without you seeing it coming. At least you won’t be replacing hard drives that were working perfectly fine before running a scan on them. Perhaps I’m just unlucky or maybe the CIA has something to do with it. I don’t know but its better to be safe than sorry so give scan disk the flick.

Overview.

Western Digital has been the market leader in high-end low cost performance hard drives for the better part of 6 years. It is difficult to compare the 150GB Raptor with its competitors because they do not offer a viable 10,000-RPM equivalent. Manufacturers such as Seagate/Maxtor, Hitachi and Samsung have been reluctant to compete with Western Digital for the high-end market dollars. For those of you wondering why I’m not considering a SCSI drive like the Seagate 10,000 RPM Cheetah, you need to understand that they are in different market’s. The cheetah is primarily a server based hard drive and in the vast majority of configurations, the Cheetahs will not be in a high end gaming PC. So with that in mind you will notice there has been no discussion or comparison throughout this article for that reason.

I can only speculate that the reason behind the competition choosing not to compete is because Western Digital is so imbedded into the market, costs would be to prohibitive to conduct a long drawn out campaign to establish themselves. They would also we waiting for the soon to come shift in technology. Solid-state hard drives are the future and companies such as Seagate may be waiting for this shift before making their move. The market will see more competition with the move to solid-state hard drives and rapid technology advances will follow. The hard drive market will finally catch up with its fast moving brothers in the CPU industry. Once these solid-state hard drives hit the mainstream markets in quantity, I predict some major shifts towards the newer system as the benefits in both speed, capacity and reliability will make current hard drives look archaic.

I think the market right now could do with more competition to increase the pressure on manufacturers to improve their products. Hard drive innovation has been dwarfed by the development gains seen in other sectors such as CPU and Graphics card manufacturers. Infact over the last 6 years there has been little to no movement at the high end of hard drive development. The only notable increase was in capacity for the industry dominant Western Digital Raptor series and version upgrades for Western Digital and Seagate SATA2 drives.

The Raptor series of hard drives originally intended to penetrate the server market and take a market share from SCSI manufacturers. Western Digital did not make too many inroads into SCSI’s market, but as a lucky spin off the high end gaming and performance work station market’s embraced Western Digital and turned it into a market leader. With the lack of competition however there has been little need for Western Digital to push the envelope of their flag ship Raptor line of hard drives. Capacity is still a problem that prevents Western Digital dominating the open market and the RPM speed of the hard drives has stayed the same since the first 36GB Raptor was introduced to the market almost 10 years ago.

For the high-end market, there really is no better choice than Western Digitals 150GB Raptor. A single Raptor will out perform two SATA2 hard drives in RAID 0 and there for is my choice in my quest to build the ultimate performance gaming machine.

Coming Soon .....

Monitors

By Gavin Gillett