Advantages: Fastest Hard Drive in the world! Disadvantages: Bit of a price tag
Western Digital have been one of the top dogs in HDD production for many years now but with the release of their new Raptor HDD they secured their place in history as the company that made the fastest HDD in the world! The WD Raptor spins at 10,000 RPM (most HDD only spin at 7,200) which makes it the fastest HDD in the world right now.
I got my new 150GB WD Raptor from Overclockers.co.uk for around £171(I only got it from there because I was getting some other parts and it made the P&P cheaper) Western Digital make 2 models of the Raptor, they make the standard Raptor and the Raptor X. There are 2 main differences between the 2 HDD, these are price and the fact that the Raptor X has a spiffy little window that you can see the disk spinning and the arm moving (in my opinion this is pointless because its inside the computer anyway, but ...
Advantages: Fast, Easy Disadvantages: Expensive, Noisy, Small Capacity
Western Digital Raptor 74GB
This 74 GB hard drive may be a little too small now for a lot of people. For the same price you can get your hands on a (non raptor) two hundred gigabyte+ drive.
On the other hand, it?s plenty of room if you are only planning to install your operating system and useful programs. These hard drives aren?t really meant for storing all your mp3?s/videos or imaging stuff on them (even though they would do that just fine) but are more for upgrading and speeding up your PC. Apart from the RAM, processor and operating system you?ve got, the speed that your hard drive spins at also influences how smooth and speedy things run. These raptor hard drives don?t come in 500/750GB versions as with your everyday Seagate?s/Maxtors in the shops, but tend to be a couple years behind with capacity ? 75GB seems almost ...
also helps with dissapating heat as it has a kind of heatsink design to it.
Installation of the device is simple enough, standard 4 large thread screws, power cable in and SATA data cable in. Some motherboards or raid controllers require you to physically set an array up although most will auto detect it.
Beware though. All SATA hard drives will only work with Windows 2000 and XP because only Windows 2000 and XP have to ability to load SCSI/SATA drivers from a floppy disk during setup. Windows 95/98 will be unable to see SATA drives at all. Linux is unknown as I haven't tried it.
The raptor I played around with was from GladiatorComputers.com and is currently £79.99, Delivery on this item is £4.69 for City Link next day couriers.
I would recommend this hard drive to any serious gamer as speed is essential and this is amazing ...
