This drive is the fastest SATA drive you can buy right now. If you have the money, get this drive. Windows and games load in a snap with this thing. The first Raptor I received was damaged in shipping, but WD's quick RMA policy had me back up and running in 2 days. So far, I am very impressed with this drive.
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Weakness: Cost, some say noise because higher speed gives a higher pitch whine, but close your box and you will not notice the difference from any other drive.
With my previous system setup, I had a standard ATA 40-gig drive that I used to backup my ATA-133 RAID drives (never backup more than you are willing to loose). The backup was starting to grow too small to back up my 33-gigs of data. I retired the 40-gig drive, set up the existing ATA-133 RAID as the new backup. Installed a new RAID pair of SATA-150 Raptor’s, -they rip! Previously a virus scan of 200,000 files took 50 minutes; the same scan now takes only 26 minutes! Hard drives are the slowest thing on a computer. The fasted CPU with a slow drive still makes a slow computer. Use RAM memory to reduce drive usage then use a fast drive to relieve the bottleneck. Even the slowest CPU will shine.
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Leaving all other 10k RPM SCSI drives in the dust, the WD740GD approaches the performance of the 15k RPM Fujitsu MAS3735 and Maxtor Atlas 15k. Overall, for non-server use, Western Digital's Raptor WD740GD is the fastest single hard disk one can buy regardless of spindle speed, interface, or price.
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Weakness: Plastic connectors easy to snap; Most Win OS's do not recognize drives on "fresh" boot.
I purchased (2) 74g 10k RPM Raptors almost 10 months ago. I run a server test lab and dev environment on top-end pc equipment. I am always tearing them down, reconfiguring, etc. My personal box is an Intel GBF 865 chipset, 2.4gHz HTT, 2gb of Corsair XS 3200 (for that screaming 800 fsb) -I love how all of the stuff is on the board now - makes reconfiguring a LOT easier.
In this setup, Raptors make such a difference it's really unfair.....to the other machines. My only other comparable box is the same setup but with 3x 10k Seagate Cheeta SCSI (LVD) drives running on a 2940 SCSI Card. I have two 2940's installed, and run tape backup (Python) and a Plextor CD-RW drive on one, and the three drives on the other. I cheated on this box, and only dropped in 500mb of Corsair XS 3200. Speed is definitely still well above average, and only minor (read: not slight) differences can be noticed. THe biggest differenc eis in the boot times - Raptors are up in less than 15 seconds from start of Post. SCSI's take 5 times that long. - A small annoyance at worst.
in terms of bang for the buck, Raptor are far and away the cream of the crop. It's very difficult to go to anything less once you've driven a Ferrari. Visiting client sites is, well...less pleasant than it used to be :).
I do have 2 compaints about the SATA drives in general, design flaws mostly...
First: it you're unlucky enough to do some bone-head thing, the connectors will snap right off - and I mean the part where it attaches to the drive itself. This happened to me on Day One, so I've got a connector that is stuck inside the SATA cable housing, and bare Copper at the drive. Makes things rather interesting, but I take the time to position it correctly and it never seems to fall of (although barely on there).
Secondly, most Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003 OS's will go through the instal routine, but then fail and say they do not recognize any valid drives. Sometimes when I have successfully installed, if I go to Disk Manager it still has some funky info for each drive, especially the primary boot partition. I have a Chaintech 9J board (sweet) but it wouldn't / couldn;t see those drives no matter what I did. All of my Intel boards did just fine | ` as long as you remember to downlaod and create a bootable CD-ROM if you happen to lose the original ship disk. Ouch.
Now if they could just get the CPU clock over it's core of 200mHz, and the back side bus=FSB. Whine.
Pros: Lightning Fast (literally), good Consumer-grade RAID; works superbly on Windows Server 2003 in all RAID configurations.
Cons: Difficulty "finding" drives without CMOS AND Driver configs prior to OS install (similar to true Server Architecture); el-Cheapo plastic connectors at the drive housing and on the Board itself.
SATA is the SCSI-killer.
Next purchase: SATA External RAID enclosure. Sweet.
The 74 gb drives (in pairs) is perfect for striping or stand-alone for normal/power users.
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Please readers, do not attempt to "rig" your drives like he did. If the plastic connector breaks, simply send it back, for you own a 5 year warrenty. ALSO the drive offers two options for power, classic four pin and the new sata power.
Strengths: As soon as I got it i put into my custom built computer and booted up with Windows XP home and it worked very fast.
I would highly suggest this harddrive to anyone. Fast Fast Fast.
Weakness: it gets a little hot so what i did was i got a harddrive cooling system for like 12 bucks and everything works great.
Get the cooling system just in case.I would highly recommened this to any one. Espically to someone buiding a custom computer.I have naver seen a computers harddrive work this fast.
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Strengths: Installed XP 32 bit in 8 minutes with =3200+ athlon64
Weakness: Price (I guess) , but it is 10,000 rpm!!
Space but I decided to use the 10,000 rpm for all software needs and store music files and video on old 120gb 7200rpm ide drive
Installed XP 32 bit in 8 minutes with =3200+ athlon64!!
I am excited by the quick response of the product and I am excited to see how it loads games and graphics as well.
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Purchased one and it died after 6 months, went through WD website and got return in 2 days. Probably was a one off bad drive. Now I bought a second for SATA Raid 1 in my shuttle SN95G5 case. Make sure it stays cool and you have a good surge protector or UPS.
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This drive works fantastic. Its really fast and has been reliable up to now. Some people think that SATA drives are unreliable, but this enterprise class drive has worked up to its advertising. (Knock on Wood) Its worth investing in a hard drive cooler for this drive though.
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i've listed more weaknesses than strengths. nevertheless, i'm going to buy another one of these to create a raid 0. i have this drive in an htpc. it's way too small to archive video, but i wanted fast drives for video editing and gaming. it's also too loud for a pure htpc.
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This hd is unbelievabely fast. My win xp pro boots up in 15 secs. Like other WD hds, this one is also little noisy esp. when reading/writing but bearable low growling sound probably due to 10,000 rpm. Some people say heat problems but I would say this one runs cooler than seagate sata 160G.
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Strengths: Fast, fast, fast. Quieter than other SATA drives I've had.
Weakness: One was DOA, but I think this was a shipping issue rather than a quality control issue.
I got 2 of these to build a RAID 0 on my system. Replaced a single Maxtor 120GB SATA drive. Unfortunately, one of the 2 did not format or test when I got it...it was DOA. I'm guessing that it was damaged in shipping, not a quality control issue. Luckily the place I got it from had a good exchange policy, and the replacement was fine. May I suggest you get the bootable diagnostics from Western Digital's website to test the drive when you first get it.
Windows boots up in 10 secs or less (not the 5 secs other people claim). But the drive is quite fast, you will notice a difference from what you have now. They do make some noise, but it's a satisfying, low-frequency "growl". The Maxtor I had was much noisier. As far as heat, I haven't touched them to see how hot they get, but I put a filtered fan in front of them just to be safe.
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Strengths: High speed. 5-year warranty. Low noise.
Weakness: None.
This really is the fastest non-SCSI hard drive out there -- it rocks! 10,000 RPM + SATA-150 = blazing speed. The drive is noticeably faster than previous 7200 IDE drives that I have owned -- and quieter. Have I mentioned the 5-year warranty? The only downside is the storage capacity is "only" 74 GB -- nothing to sneeze at, but still below some of the 250+ MB drives that are coming out. Still, I use this drive to install programs to and for some data storage, but I have a larger capacity 7200 RPM storage for data backup and longer term data storage.
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Weakness: Misleading hype about product's speed. Poor tech support.
After reading favorable user reviews, such as those above, I had high hopes for this drive and paid almost $200 (US). The reality is that the Raptor is no faster, and in some cases is slower than a $99 Maxtor 6L100M0 (SATA 7200 RPM). The fact of the matter is that the Raptor's max host to platter speed is 72 MB/sec (per WD specs), so my example was performing to design specs. Benchmark tests were conducted using Sandra and HD Tach. Subjective observations were made during XP install, boot, and a variety of applications: the WD was no faster and in some cases slower than the much cheaper Maxtor. My advice is to save your money and buy a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB Hard Drive for around $120 (US), the WD 74GB Raptor is not worth the extra money and WD's tech support is inept and rude.
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Maxtor drives, unfortunately, have a nasty habit of failing close to the warranty period (1 Year for Retail and 3 years for bare drive) -- I had two fail within a month of one another.
The WD Raptors are warranted for 5 years.
The Maxtor drives, using IO Meter, prove to be MUCH slower than their WD competition.. MUCH slower is 200% less performance.
You can read this for yourself at this site:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2005q1/maxtor-diamondmax10/index.x?pg=4
I am satisifed with the performance of this drive. I just upgraded from an "ancient" Maxtor 30GB ATA/33 drive, and the difference is immediately noticeable. I've heard other people complain about the noise level of this drive, but the only time I encountered this was during defrag; the read write heads have to move hella fast due to the high RPMs. The only real complaint I have is the price of the drive vs. it's capacity. It's really too bad they couldn't squeeze 20-30 more GB on it to make it a better value (NewEgg does have a $25 MIR on this unit though). When the price does drop, I will definitely buy a second one.
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Strengths: 2X raptors in raid 0 = heaven, Crazy hard drive speed, quick installs anything youc an think of.
Weakness: Price
In my gaming rig I ahve two of these bad boys for my windows and computer run programs and boy does teh speed scream. I play Half-life2 and everythign loads extremely fast. If your an avid gamer I suggest you pick up one or two it wil make installations and proccessing a lot easier,
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If you can afford the additional cost get a raptor (or 2). Noise and temperature has never been an issue for me. I just got a second one and I'm looking forward to striping them. 74GB is enough space for the average person, but 2x78GB will serve most enthusiast's needs.
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Strengths: Works in a Powermac G5 computer like it should, unlike its newer sibling the Raptor 150.
Its speed is still one that all other HD's are measured against.
Weakness: Price. It's still pricey considering its age and size.
Did I mention how small it is?
This is a must have drive if you crave faster boot times and loading times for your games. It's a smoothie when it comes to sustained reads and writes and benchmarks mean nothing when you have this drive and the performance is noticed right out of the box. It's just snappier than any other drive out there.
Unfortunately the new Raptor 150 suffers "Apple's Disease", meaning it doesn't work properly in a G5 Powermac.
So if you're a Mac user, this drive is still the King. I give it 5 stars and the Raptor 150 a "ZERO".
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Strengths: Fast Fast Fast and did I mention Fast. I have two of these hard drives and let me tell you if you want speed these are for you!
Weakness: No weaknesses so far some people will say they run hot I disagree with the proper case (one with a 120mm fan in the front of where the hard drives are mounted) there is no heat problem.
Overal I highly recomend these hard drives the reason I bought these was mainly because I have read in numerous places that the 2 74GBs are faster then 2 36Gbs. I had no problems installing these hard drives. I did install them in a new system however so I'm not sure if there would be difficulty installing one or two in an already running system.
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I have used this hard drive for only 5 days, and I am very impressed! This thing is blazing fast and quieter than most WD hard drives. I highly reccomend this hard drive. OS loads up in 5 seconds! You don't even have to wait for games to load up either! Just make sure that you have some good intake fans blowing over the hard drives, they produce quite a bit of heat.
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This HDD is fast , but dose not fast as its price , with this speed , i think that i bought a 8000 rpm Hard not a 10000 rpm ! With the Sandra Benchmark its overall performance is 57 m/s , also i test the WD800JB Caviar 7200 rpm , its overall performance is 52 m/s !!!! The WD800JB Caviar Just Cost 56$ But The Raptor Cost 173$ !
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Strengths: Fastest access time I've seen. (4-5 ms)
Weakness: none
The noise during access tells you that the computer is working, which is nice expecially during games and long load times. This way, you know the computer has not frozen up. When I installed this drive, it was on a AMD 1Ghz and it practically doubled the speed of the entire computer, because of access times and 90MB/s or so read/write speeds.
This drive is great.
I use this as my primary boot drive in my PowerMac Dual G5, and it really accelerates the system to a new level. "Repair disk permissions" or "Repair Disk" is done in less than 30 seconds in Tiger! To get over the lower capacity I put my iPhoto and iTunes libraries on the 160GB Drive shipped with the Mac ( as well as most of my data files). If you have some extra $ and want to speed up your PowerMac G5 this is a good bet. Don't forget that you can install Tiger on both hard drives for a dual boot system - a good precaution against boot failure rare as it is.
Weakness: Cost, some say noise because higher speed gives a higher pitch whine, but close your box and you will not notice the difference from any other drive.
With my previous system setup, I had a standard ATA 40-gig drive that I used to backup my ATA-133 RAID drives (never backup more than you are willing to loose). The backup was starting to grow too small to back up my 33-gigs of data. I retired the 40-gig drive, set up the existing ATA-133 RAID as the new backup. Installed a new RAID pair of SATA-150 Raptor’s, -they rip! Previously a virus scan of 200,000 files took 50 minutes; the same scan now takes only 26 minutes! Hard drives are the slowest thing on a computer. The fasted CPU with a slow drive still makes a slow computer. Use RAM memory to reduce drive usage then use a fast drive to relieve the bottleneck. Even the slowest CPU will shine.
ReviewGist for Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74 GB SATA Hard Drive
Performance is Good according to 3 Hard Drive experts. -- "In a media-rich environment, this offers the best performance for most users."-extremetech.com -- "quieter performance"-pcstats.com Read more to find expert opinions on more features like Technology, Noise, etc.
Testseek.com has collected 14 expert reviews for Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA150 WD740GD and the average expert rating is 86 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.
Smart Hard Drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 and Western Digital WD740 Raptor
The WD360 Raptor has already made a name for itself with the reliability so prized in SCSI drives even at high power, but with a serial ATA interface to boot. That makes the Raptor the first SATA drive that can be used in power-intensive settings.
WD Raptor 74 GB Internal Hard Drive - 1 Pack
Strengths: Very Fast
Weakness: Expensive, Slightly Loud
This drive is the fastest SATA drive you can buy right now. If you have the money, get this drive. Windows and games load in a snap with this thing. The first Raptor I received was damaged in shipping, but WD's quick RMA policy had me back up and running in 2 days. So far, I am very impressed with this drive.
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