Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD 74 GB > Reviews > Blistering fast but a little noisy

Author's product rating:   

Memory / capacity	Good
Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Satisfactory
Speed	Very fast
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Reliable and fast
Disadvantages:	Noisy

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I personally bought this drive as I am a gamer and as fellow gamers know the faster the better.

My previous drive was a 7200rpm and boy did I notice the difference in speed once I started using the raptor. Faster access to my programs and files, quicker boot-up.

According to the WD website these are one of the most reliable drives on the market and I tend to agree. I am currently purchasing a second one of these.

PROS:

Very fast and very reliable. The difference once you have is installed the disc is plain to see. 1.5 Gb/s transfer rate and 16 MB Cache.

This drive is also a SATA drive, which I find is less messy inside the pc then the chunky IDC cables. Can use one of 2 power supplies (standard or sata power supply)

CONS:

I found the drive to be very noisy at times but this may be down to needing some king of vibration control, which is very cheap.

It may also be a little light for some people on the capacity front (74GB) but if been used as the primary drive there is no reason not to have a larger backup drive to store your data. A cheap 7200 drive could attach to the now free IDC slot.

I also had a few initial problems in getting the operating system to install on the drive and actually see it as drive C. This just involved some tweaking in the bios.

OVERALL:

I would highly recommend this drive to anyone who wants that little more speed and the reliability as long as your requirements on capacity are not too high. I am happy with the drive and as mentioned I am in the process of buying another