Western Digital Raptor

Tags: 150 gb, 7200 rpms, serial ata (sata), western digital raptor

Western Digital Raptor Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor

Computer technology seems to move at the speed of light, what is new on the shelf today will be outdated by the time you get it home!

Expansions in memory, hard drive space and computer capability could be frustrating if you had to go out and buy a new computer every few weeks.

However, many people choose to upgrade their current equipment instead.

For instance, you may want to simply purchase a new operating system or a secondary hard drive as it is much cheaper and generally easy to do. One popular choice for upgrades is the Western Digital Raptor hard drive.

Features

150 GB hard drive
10,000 RPM
16 MB cache
Serial ATA (SATA)
$398.95 Amazon

Pros

This is one of the first SATA hard drives to turn faster than 7200 RPMs. With 10,000 RPMS under the hood, your computer will scream through many applications that slowed it down in the past. The Western Digital Raptor was definitely leading the pack with this feature.

If you are going to be using more than one hard drive in your computer, you may want to use a RAID setup. This protects you from data loss and speeds up the processes of your computer by allowing it to write to two drives at the same time.

Your read and write times will be significantly better and since you are saving information on two drives you will lose nothing if one of your drives fail. Some economy hard drives will not work in a RAID set up but the Western Digital Raptor will.

Another thing you will notice with the Western Digital Raptor is the increased cache size. This also affects the speed of your computer when it comes to loading programs and running applications.

This is the memory section of your computer that stores information used on a regular basis for your CPU. When the CPU can quickly get its instructions from the cache your machine runs faster and more efficiently.

However, with a small cache size many times the CPU must go to the RAM for instructions thereby slowing down the whole process.

The standard cache size on many hard drives is 4-8 MB while the Western Digital Raptor offers 16. This is a significant improvement and should show up in performance.

Conclusion

There are bigger hard drives on the market, including the descendent of this model the Velociraptor. If you can find the original Western Digital Raptor for a decent price, it is still the best buy.

It has been available on the market for several years now and has proven itself in reliability and speed. This is one great hard drive and is easy to install even for the novice user.

Here's Western Digital Raptor Selections:

Western Digital 150 GB VelociRaptor SATA 10,000 RP...	Customer Review: As a computer techy I was pleasantly surprised at the speed of the WD Velociraptor. The response times are nothing short of amazing. I was looking into getting a Solid State Hard Drive until I stumbled onto the Velociraptor. The reviews on this produ... Read More	(54)
Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM...	Customer Review: Drive works great...replaced two 36gb Raptors with this one. Have not used it in a RAID setup but I noticed better performance with the 16mb cache over the 36gb Raptor which only had an 8mb cache.... Read More	(5)
WD360GD Western Digital Raptor 36 GB 10K RPM 8MB B...	Customer Review: Click Here for More Info
Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36GB SATA 10K...	Customer Review: Click Here for More Info	$196.20
Western Digital WD1500AHFDRTL Raptor X 150GB SATA/...	Customer Review: This hard drive is fat and reliable. If you can get this hard drive for less than a hundred, then its a steal,. Worth every penny! And if you have money to spend, go for the New VelociRaptor!... Read More	$411.99 (20)