Only a couple of days have passed since we saw the first previews of Western Digital’s new Raptor harddrive. Inspite of it’s excellent specifications, 10k RPM, 8 MB cache and SATA-interface the performance was way below expectations. Already then it was strongly emphasized that this was only a preproduct example which might not show the entire truth of the completed product. Nobody probably knew how correct that statement was and now Anandtech has the chance to prove what the Raptor drive is really capable of. They have gotten their hands on a real production example with an updated firmware directly from WD and the performance increase is, to say the least, impressive. It seems as if the activation of the drive’s write cache was the key to the problem and we can now see that Western Digital Raptor really is the performance monster we first expected.
Read the review at Anandtech.com.
