Western Digital Raptor WD360GD 36.7 GB > Reviews > If you can afford it, theres no substitue

Author's product rating:   

Memory / capacity	Satisfactory
Reliability	Excellent
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed	Very fast
Value For Money	Very poor

Advantages:	Fast, fast and fast !
Disadvantages:	Noisy and expensive

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If you want the maximum in hard drive speed this is what you want. Almost as fast as most SCSI drives but accessible to the home user with not much experience.

This is a 36GB drive with a punch. Most SATA drives will never reach their full potential mainly due to their spindle speed of 7,200RPM, but the Raptors are one of the few drives with 10,000 RPM. Coupled with the 150MHz SATA bus speed this leads to transfer rates edging on 100 Mbps.

For all this speed you do pay for it, at over £1/GB it aint cheap, but if performance is what you're after this is it! Its noisy as well, although for some reason my older Raptor (I have 3) is quieter than my 2 new ones.... I've had one for over a year with no problems what so ever, although I only trully appreciated the speed when I bought another 2 and set up a RAID array. My PC boots to the Windows XP desktop in just over 30 seconds!

To install you need a set of driver floppies for your chosen SATA controller, usually downloaded from the website. This isnt true of pre-NT OSs (Win98 etc.) which can use the disk straight off! (atleast with a Sil3114 SATA chipset, not guaranteed with others).

Physical installation is like any other HDD, with no problems at all. The drive has connectors for both a SATA power cable and a standard molex connector, great if you have an old PSU. It's also well built, although it does get very hot during heavy usage so make sure you have plenty of cooling.

Pros: fast as lightening

Cons: expensive, noisy and not great capacity

Conclusion: if money where really no object you'd go for SCSI, but for most home users this is the best you can get. If you need more space, consider the 74GB version, or like me get several and set up RAID (only for advanced user!). On the other hand if money is tight and performance not top of the agenda then there's plenty other good SATA drives out there offering much better value for money (and noise polution).

NOTE: I have OEM versions with no manuals and haven't used support hence the poor ratings..