My 150GB Raptor seems "slower" than my 74GB Raptor (Old)

Hey All,

Almost 2 years ago I bought the newly released revision (WD740GD-00FLC0):

http://www.storagereview.com/article...-00FLC0_1.html

And I love it every day. Then I went out and bought the new 150GB (16MB Cache) and installed Vista.

It seems a bit "slower" compared to my older, smaller version which also has 1/2 amount of cache. (8MB).

Now, before you all blame it on Vista, let me tell you that I have installed the same Vista (Ultimate) on an IDE Caviar version (80GB model) and that one seems faster than my 150GB.

To be honest, since I would like to overclock my system, I have reset everything in my BIOS to default settings, so for example my Opteron146 is set to the default 2GHz instead of 2.6GHz when I did this comparison. Could the CPU be factor for this "slowness"?

Right now the Vista Rating reads every components 5.9, instead of CPU and RAM of course which are 4.1. (when I OC'ed my CPU, RAM, they read 5.9)

Your insights and comments would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!

If the processor and RAM are slower than they were the last time you did a test, then it will make a major difference. The HDD is only a small part of your overall system performance.

OK thanks. I bought it for $159! (retail box)

I have done further reading, and it seems that 74GB are 'faster' (at least for now) due to the fact that they don't have NQC feature.

The 74GB scores marginally higher in some benchmarks, but in actual use the 150GB shouldn't "seem" any slower at all.

How can I disable NCQ? Do I need to install nVidia's nForce4 SLI (AMD) drivers?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CannibalCorpse

How can I disable NCQ? Do I need to install nVidia's nForce4 SLI (AMD) drivers?

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I agree with Soul Assassin... the slowdown is most likely caused by the fact that your system is no longer overclocked. If you were to overclock your system back to 2.6Ghz, I'm sure you'll see the performance go back up.

And if you haven't installed the nForce drivers under whatever OS you are currently running, you'll want to do that ASAP. Not having those drivers installed could also cause performance to drop by a large amount.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CannibalCorpse

Thanks!

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you say it's faster, i believe you.

the 150 might be faster for some spec's. but, sounds like, for the combination of access time & transfer speed that are involved in booting to the Windows desktop, the 74 just plain does it faster.

CannibalCorpse: Did you say you bought a 150GB Raptor for $159 Retail? If so, where?

best buy had them for that price a while back. got my raptor x about 3(?) months ago from there.