Western Digital Raptor (wd740gd) 74 GB Hard Drive

Pros: SATA, 10.000 rpm class speed, one of a kind (in early 2005), easy installation
Cons: Pricey, relatively low capacity, bigger and 'badder' drives expected soon, no match for SCSI capacities

Processors are usually the main argument for computer speed, and often users forget about the importance of memory and essentially the system's ability to get data to and from the processor. What good is a 4GHz processor if it sits idle most of the time ...

Pros: Amazing Speed and 5 year warranty
Cons: Should they call it $ATA? Capacity might be an issue for some.

UPDATE: LAKE FOREST, Calif., March 7, 2005 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- For the third straight year, Western Digital Corp. (WDC) was named favorite overall manufacturer in the hard drive industry by the readers of Tom's Hardware Guide ...

Pros: Fast, runs quietly
Cons: Needs a fan to keep it cool

The Raptor 74GB is a superb hard drive. I’ve had one running for over a year, another one for seven months; and I just bought a third to replace a relic drive from IBM that keeps shutting off. (IBM hard drives were bought out by Hitachi.) When I ...

Pros: Fast.. almost 15k SCSI speed
Cons: A lot more expensive than other SATA drives

There are two types of SATA disk: Raptor, and everything else. The Raptor is a 10k RPM drive when all other SATA disks are 7.2k RPM, and has slightly higher specs. The 74Gb Raptor also supports advanced SATA functions like command queueing.

I put two raptors into my new PC in a RAID 0 array. This is less fault tolerant than a single disk, but reads and writes are spread over two disks, making response times much faster. It certainly feels much quicker when booting applications such as MS Visual Studio .NET

In Sisoft Sandra however, I'm only getting about 69mb/sec average performance whereas other Raptor Raid0 arrays get higher performance. I suspect this is largely down to the SATA controller: my motherboard has a Silicon Image SI3114 and although this is quick, I don't think it's the fastest out there. So make sure you don't neglect this element when building a power system.

Pros: Best prices for a decent-sized 10K RPM drive were all for this drive.
Cons: Reliability is questionable.

I recently ordered one of these from Monarch Computers and the drive worked for about a day and then stopped working. The drive was so messed up that the Western Digital diagnostic program just locked up my PC. As a programmer I do a lot with computers and this is my fourth Western Digital drive that has gone bad in the last six years. I've had to reload Windows and Linux and all my programs *four* times in the last six years just because of Western Digital drives going bad. If I were you I wouldn't use a Western Digital drive as a primary hard drive because you'll just end up losing everything on the drive in a year or two (or possibly in the next day or two). On the upside, both Monarch Computers and Western Digital support have been great and replaced every busted hard drive without question.