Western Digital Raptor is most likely the only true series of enthusiast harddrives, even if it wasn’t intended as one to begin with. The drives were intended as a cheaper alternative for companies instead of using SCSI-drives. Unfortunately the companies weren’t interested since the Raptor drives simply couldn’t measure up to the SCSI drives when it came down to pure server performance. WD updated its drives with command queuing and more capacity and the drives became much more attractive but the interest from the companies was still low. The only ones that were genuinly interested in the drives were the enthusiasts. Now that generation 3 arrives things are looking a bit different and for once the drives has a decent storage capacity.
WD has chosen to acknowledge the interest from the enthusiasts and therefore launch two new drives where one of them is intended for these people and the other as a cheap alternative for servers. This time they don’t have to fight with the SCSI drives at uneven conditions either as they now use the same physical connectors while the SAS chips can control SATA drives as well.
Raptor X is the name of the harddrive intended for enthusiasts, while the server version is called Raptor 150, which then of course hints you of the capacity at 150GB. The difference between the two are simply the looks of them. Raptor X comes with a see through top which makes it possible to see into the drive while it works, while Raptor 150 is completely strict in its appearance. The drives are beneath the shell identical when it comes to both electronics and mechanics. 10,000rpm, 4.6ms access times, buffer at 16MB and 150GB diveded into two discs at 75GB each.
The performance with these drives, or perhaps we should say this drive, are good. When it comes acess times and transfer speeds the drive lives up to what WD promises basically. The real performance tests shows that WD has worked and has done it right. The Raptor crushes its earlier brother with up to almost 25% in some tests and there is no doubt who is the king of the SATA market. It also manages to keep up with the faster SCSI drives in most tests and even takes one home.
The price of these will be $300 for Raptop 150 and $350 for Raptor X.
:: Read on at storagereview
Related reviews: Raptor 74GB :: Raptor 36.7GB
