I have been running a Western Digital Raptor 74 (WD740ADFD-00NLR5) on my development PC for a couple of years. Before that, I had an older Raptor, the 740GD-00FLA with 8 MB cache. I never had a problem with either of them, except for the noise. The loud reads and writes by the drives had annoyed me in the past, and one day I decided it was time for a change.
I had run a Seagate Cheetah before (and a Quantum Atlas before that), but I didn’t like having thick cables and extra expansion boards in my computer case. I had also run two 74 GB Raptor’s in RAID 0 (backed up to a NAS device, of course). Cables. Cable terminators. Expansion boards. More heat issues to worry about. In the end, it came down to reliability and speed, and I needed both… (and before you state SSD’s, I think I’ll pass until I see some long-term numbers).
The first thing I noticed about the VelociRaptor was that it was QUIET. Really quiet. As quiet as my WD Blue and Black Caviar’s. It runs cooler and appears to draw less power as well (and no, you can’t run it in a notebook).
How does it perform? I decided to find out.
I used the same test configuration as my previous WD Blue/Black test to maintain some consistency.
The numbers speak for themselves 