choucove
New Member
In the past we too have used Western Digital raptor hard drives for their 10k rpm speeds. This made a noticeable difference over basic 7,200rpm hard drives that we had used before, and still have four production computers using raptor hard drives, one of which has two of them in a RAID 0 array as well.
However, even though they are cheaper than a mid-capacity SSD, there is no comparison in performance. The latest versions of the VelociRaptor hard drives, when using two in RAID 0, can come close to the throughput of some of the better SSDs based on the (now aging) Indilix controller. This would include the OCZ Vertex 2 hard drive, and similar generation SSDs like the Intel G2 SSDs. However, in the last year new controllers and technology has come out on many latest-generation SSDs which double the performance of previous generation SSDs. For example, the OCZ Vertex 2 drive had an average throughput of around 200 MB/s to 250 MB/s read and writes. The new OCZ Vertex 3 has between 500 MB/s and 550 MB/s. And that's just a single drive. Our production system using two raptors in RAID 0 currently has an average throughput of about 150 MB/s which is nowhere close. There are a lot of other factors as well, such as access times and massive amounts of IO speed that truly put SSDs in a class of their own.
Raptors can be a great alternative if you truly need more than 300 GB of space on your primary partition, but their days are limited. SSDs continue to decline in price and offer more and more performance, growing by leaps and bounds every generation. My current computer is using a RAID 0 array of two OCZ Vertex 1 drives from my previous computer build. Both of these drives in RAID 0 are barely faster than a single OCZ Vertex 2 drive, and about half the speed of a single OCZ Vertex 3 drive!
In my case (probably because I have the SSDs in a RAID array) Windows 7 didn't automatically detect some of the options to disable based on the drive being an SSD. The only one that Windows 7 did disable is disk defragmentation on the SSD, but I had to turn off Indexing, hibernation, and superfetch/prefetch manually.
As for the Dell monitors, you shouldn't have any problem with it connecting and working just fine with any other monitor. At home I use a Samsung SyncMaster 24" HDTV monitor and an Acer 19" LCD spare monitor together and, while I can easily tell the color difference between the nicer and newer Samsung and the older cheaper Acer, there's absolutely no problems. Especially saying that your existing monitor and this Dell Ultrasharp U2211H are almost identical size, it would be pretty nice as well. Often the hardest thing to get used to is different sized monitors. Does your existing monitor support full 1080p resolution? I know that the U2211H is a 1920 X 1080 resolution monitor. It also has connectors for VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort.
I'm very tempted to get a few of these monitors myself sometime to set up on a three-way monitor stand - two to run off my main computer system and one to connect solely to a DVI 4-port KVM switch I have to allow me to switch between other computers I'm working on.
I'm really not sure what to make of the freezing glitch at boot up that seems to plague these systems occasionally. It could very well be a BIOS issue, but if it is it's something they have not fixed yet. I flashed this motherboard to the latest release only a couple weeks ago when I reinstalled everything on my system. I've heard from another person who has a similar motherboard, also from ASUS, that still has the same thing happen about once a month.
However, even though they are cheaper than a mid-capacity SSD, there is no comparison in performance. The latest versions of the VelociRaptor hard drives, when using two in RAID 0, can come close to the throughput of some of the better SSDs based on the (now aging) Indilix controller. This would include the OCZ Vertex 2 hard drive, and similar generation SSDs like the Intel G2 SSDs. However, in the last year new controllers and technology has come out on many latest-generation SSDs which double the performance of previous generation SSDs. For example, the OCZ Vertex 2 drive had an average throughput of around 200 MB/s to 250 MB/s read and writes. The new OCZ Vertex 3 has between 500 MB/s and 550 MB/s. And that's just a single drive. Our production system using two raptors in RAID 0 currently has an average throughput of about 150 MB/s which is nowhere close. There are a lot of other factors as well, such as access times and massive amounts of IO speed that truly put SSDs in a class of their own.
Raptors can be a great alternative if you truly need more than 300 GB of space on your primary partition, but their days are limited. SSDs continue to decline in price and offer more and more performance, growing by leaps and bounds every generation. My current computer is using a RAID 0 array of two OCZ Vertex 1 drives from my previous computer build. Both of these drives in RAID 0 are barely faster than a single OCZ Vertex 2 drive, and about half the speed of a single OCZ Vertex 3 drive!
In my case (probably because I have the SSDs in a RAID array) Windows 7 didn't automatically detect some of the options to disable based on the drive being an SSD. The only one that Windows 7 did disable is disk defragmentation on the SSD, but I had to turn off Indexing, hibernation, and superfetch/prefetch manually.
As for the Dell monitors, you shouldn't have any problem with it connecting and working just fine with any other monitor. At home I use a Samsung SyncMaster 24" HDTV monitor and an Acer 19" LCD spare monitor together and, while I can easily tell the color difference between the nicer and newer Samsung and the older cheaper Acer, there's absolutely no problems. Especially saying that your existing monitor and this Dell Ultrasharp U2211H are almost identical size, it would be pretty nice as well. Often the hardest thing to get used to is different sized monitors. Does your existing monitor support full 1080p resolution? I know that the U2211H is a 1920 X 1080 resolution monitor. It also has connectors for VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort.
I'm very tempted to get a few of these monitors myself sometime to set up on a three-way monitor stand - two to run off my main computer system and one to connect solely to a DVI 4-port KVM switch I have to allow me to switch between other computers I'm working on.
I'm really not sure what to make of the freezing glitch at boot up that seems to plague these systems occasionally. It could very well be a BIOS issue, but if it is it's something they have not fixed yet. I flashed this motherboard to the latest release only a couple weeks ago when I reinstalled everything on my system. I've heard from another person who has a similar motherboard, also from ASUS, that still has the same thing happen about once a month.
