[badman3670]

Western Digital has earned themselves quite a reputation in the Computing Enthusiast market with their line of Raptor hard drives. Originally targeted as "Enterprise class" SATA variants of what WD had historically brought to market for high-end SCSI server storage solutions, the 10K RPM Raptor was an overnight success for end user performance freaks, including many of us here at HotHardware.com. WD's first iteration of the drive was a somewhat overly-svelte 36GB version that came outfitted with an 8MB cache. And it was actually not what one would term a "native SATA" drive, with a Marvell PATA to SATA bridge chip handling calls for the drive's SATA 1.5GBps interface back into what was essentially a PATA circuit block.

The second coming of the Raptor (yes it was near god-like to some), marked a welcomed increase in capacity to 74GB, with a pair of 36GB platters inside. The drive retained the bridge chip for its SATA interface, but updated firmware along with quieter operational acoustics and overall better performance, just offered more of a good thing. Plugging a pair of Raptor WD740s into a RAID 0 array was becoming commonplace in many Gaming Rigs and high-end Workstations. Regardless, the insatiable need for more storage capacity marches on, along with the need-for-speed; it almost goes without saying. With huge capacity drives like Hitachi's 7K500 entering the market, as well as new advances in 3GBps SATA interfaces speeds and other technologies like NCQ (native command queuing), Western Digital had to answer the call.

Physical Specs -
- Capacity 150GB
- Interface: SATA 150 MB/s
- Spindle Speed: 10,000 RPM
- Cache Buffer: 16MB
- Number Of Platters: 2
- Number Of Heads: 4
- Bytes Per Sector: 512
- Height 1.028 Inches
- Length 5.787 Inches
- Width 4.00 Inches
- Weight 1.81 Pounds

Performance Specs -
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)
- Buffer To Disk 84 MB/s (Sustained)
Acoustics
- Idle Mode 29 dBA (average)
- Seek Mode 0 36 dBA (average)
Power Dissipation
- Read/Write 10.02 Watts
- Idle 9.19 Watts
- Standby 2.66 Watts
- Sleep 2.48 Watts

Features -
- Native Command Queuing (NCQ)
- RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) — a feature unique to WD, prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.
- Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF™) — optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multidrive systems such as rack-mounted servers or network storage.
- FlexPower™ — connector technology that accepts power from either industry-standard or new SATA power supplies.

5-year warranty
600,000 hour MTBF - Raptor X
1.2M hour MTBF - Raptor WD1500ADFD

[webmaster]

It will be interesting to see some tests of this drive. I use a laptop, so I only use a 5.400 RPM disc.

You guys who uses a raptor, do you think your system got a lot faster compared to a 7.200 RPM disc?

[badman3670]

i have seen greater speeds with my sata drives and alot less crashes, than i do with my cabled drives. just my opinion though. i have found that my processors workload is less also.

i have always had trouble with wd up until about two years ago. just like seagate and maxtor. but it seems that since i went to sata that i haven't had any problems running 7200 rpms with my 3.2 gig dual processor.

i can install software for example adobe illustrator in 3 minutes flat. and you guys know how much resources it uses up. now that is also with 3 gig of ram too. this is a mod case i built just for doing graphic design.

[webmaster]

I guess it's some differences between my 5.400 and your Raptor then