Western Digital Raptor SATA 74 GB Hard Drive

After reading favorable user reviews, such as those above, I had high hopes for this drive and paid almost $200 (US). The reality is that the Raptor is no faster, and in some cases is slower than a $99 Maxtor 6L100M0 (SATA 7200 RPM). The fact of the matter is that the Raptor's max host to platter speed is 72 MB/sec (per WD specs), so my example was performing to design specs. Benchmark tests were conducted using Sandra and HD Tach. Subjective observations were made during XP install, boot, and a variety of applications: the WD was no faster and in some cases slower than the much cheaper Maxtor. My advice is to save your money and buy a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB Hard Drive for around $120 (US), the WD 74GB Raptor is not worth the extra money and WD's tech support is inept and rude.

By the way, the best BURST performance that I ever measured was 124MB/sec, not 150MB/sec. Buyer beware!

This drive is indeed fast; however, WD has had to replace two drives (same model) so far. The first one, which I bought, lasted 1.5 years. The second one, replaced by WD and a recertified drive, lasted only 4 months. On the bright side, WD has good customer support; they're replacing the replacement with a larger capacity 160 GB Raptor, also recertified.

I don't get it - I compared this drive to 2 7200 rpm SATA drives, all installed in a high end system (GA-P32-DS4 mobo w/ Intel e8400 processor), and even the WD 500 GB 5400-7200 drive beat it. My test cases were real world processing, running Quickpar2 on a set of 150 files, and doing a render of 4 minutes of HD mpeg video. This expensive 10000 rpm drive was the slowest. How can all these people be getting such good results? Very strange. I'm returning it and going with a Raid0 with a pair of 7200 rpm 160's, less money and twice as fast!