Advantages: Fast Fast & Fast!
Disadvantages: Hot, Pricy.

...Western Digital does it again. They release an update to the fastest Sata drive on the market, which was overdue, but well worth the wait. These drives are up to any task you can throw at them. These Raptors are super fast. Simply, the fastest available hard drive for desktop computers in the world. They have got excellent seek time and data transfer rate. Installing and loading Windows is just fun on these drives. Games load extremely fast. Data copying is just matter of minutes. You can even combine two Raptors in raid to increase the performance beyond all levels. The drive is fast but gets hot. So, proper air flow across the drive is very important. One more negative aspect of the drive is its very high price. Also, the drive is available in a maximum capacity of 150 GB which is very little for these days. The decision is up to you... Read review

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Advantages: Fastest Hard Drive in the world!
Disadvantages: Bit of a price tag

...Western Digital have been one of the top dogs in HDD production for many years now but with the release of their new Raptor HDD they secured their place in history as the company that made the fastest HDD in the world! The WD Raptor spins at 10,000 RPM (most HDD only spin at 7,200) which makes it the fastest HDD in the world right now. I got my new 150GB WD Raptor from Overclockers.co.uk for around £171(I only got it from there because I was getting some other parts and it made the P&P cheaper) Western Digital make 2 models of the Raptor, they make the standard Raptor and the Raptor X. There are 2 main differences between the 2 HDD, these are price and the fact that the Raptor X has a spiffy little window that you can see the disk spinning and the arm moving (in my opinion this is pointless because its inside the computer anyway... Read review

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Advantages: Super fast, the best on the market
Disadvantages: Maximum size is 160GB, very expensive.

...that even the 36GB Raptor is alot more expensive than some 150GB drives. This drive isn't really a budget drive for someone looking to build a simple home computer. However, its a great drive for the speed freak in you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- If you've got any questions just leave them as feedback to this review and i'll answer all your questions.... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, reliable
Disadvantages: expensive

...Yes, the Western Digital Raptor 74Gb is definately worth the extra money. I put this drive into my computer this summer and have so far had no regrets. For me it was a choice between paying for size or paying for quality and speed. I chose quality and speed and that is why I have ended up with this drive. The drive itself runs 2,500 RPM faster than your average SATA hard drive. This might not sound a lot but it pretty much halves the seek time, the time it takes the drives head to collect the data you have requested, this has a bigger impact on performance than you would think if you don't know a lot about PC's. Buying yourself a fast harddrive not only improves loading times in games it can help improve the loading time of any application. For instance windows loads much faster and files are generally accessed much quicker. If you do... Read review

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Advantages: Fast and cheaper than others
Disadvantages: can always be cheaper

.... This is a serious buy, its not that much slower than enterprise hard drives like raptors. Raptors spin faster (10k rpm vs 7.2k rpm) and have lower latency but these benefits hardly show up to the average user at home and the drawbacks of much less HD capacity (36gb for the price of one of these western digital 500gb HDs) and also the running temp and noise of raptors are enough to warrent a purchase of the WD 500gb hard drive over any Raptor. Seeing as raptors are out of the Question (in my own opinion, although others will agree with me) you could go for something cheaper, but like i said, as you go down in price the value goes down a lot. For about 15 pounds less you end up with much slowers drives that dont have much capacity. These drives deserve an award for such performance price ratio as well as capacity price ratio.... Read review

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Advantages: Fast, Easy
Disadvantages: Expensive, Noisy, Small Capacity

...Western Digital Raptor 74GB This 74 GB hard drive may be a little too small now for a lot of people. For the same price you can get your hands on a (non raptor) two hundred gigabyte+ drive. On the other hand, it’s plenty of room if you are only planning to install your operating system and useful programs. These hard drives aren’t really meant for storing all your mp3’s/videos or imaging stuff on them (even though they would do that just fine) but are more for upgrading and speeding up your PC. Apart from the RAM, processor and operating system you’ve got, the speed that your hard drive spins at also influences how smooth and speedy things run. These raptor hard drives don’t come in 500/750GB versions as with your everyday Seagate’s/Maxtors in the shops, but tend to be a couple years behind with capacity – 75GB seems almost small... Read review

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Advantages: Fast and quiet, simple to install
Disadvantages: Small capacity compared to other drives, 150GB version is faster

...I bought one of these after checking out the charts on Toms hardware site. Although it has now been superceeded by the 150GB model it is still a fantastic drive and currently the second fastest on Toms charts. The combination of 16mb memory cache and 10,000 rpm makes it incredibly fast and I've witnessed a significant difference in the time taken to start up windows and other hefty applications. Despite its performance this drive doesn't announce itself with the sort of noise levels you might expect. If anything it is quieter than my old IDE drive and in a totally different league to the SCSI drives on our servers at work. I'm using this in an Antec superlanboy case which has removable drive trays. The rubber grommets between the trays and the drive provide some vibration dampening but I expected this drive to be much louder. I'm glad I... Read review

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Advantages: amazing speed and cuts of bottlenecks
Disadvantages: its a bit expensive but it has good results

...... Read review

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

...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... Read review

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Advantages: 10,000 RPM, SATA
Disadvantages: Size

...This hard drive is nothing short of fantastic. Right, straight to the tech details. Its a 36gb hard drive. Now i first thought that its too small, but lets face it, this hard drive has been designed for being a main system drive and not a data drive so its only going to really have MS Windows, Office, A load of applications and games. Its Serial ATA so it talks to the motherboard and processor at 150MHz which is 50MHz faster than most standard hard drives. It spins at 10,000rpm. This means programs load quicker, it is also incredably useful for people who do video editing due to the quicker access times that the fast spin provides although those sorts of people may want to consider its bigger brother which has 74gb capacity. The physical design of the product is outstanging, its designed to reduce noise and vibration, it also... Read review

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