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Game PC reviews the Raptor WD740GD
Today at GamePC, we've got not one, not two, not four, but six of the new Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB series. We'll run the drive though a battery of tests against some other competing drives, and see how the new Raptor performs at various RAID levels, including the ever-so-elusive RAID-50 with LSI's new MegaRAID-6 Serial ATA controller card. We'll also look at how these new Raptor drives push the limits of current 32-bit PCI technology, and what kind of performance benefits one will see by moving to 64-bit PCI. RAID aficionados; hold on to your knickers!
Read the review at [link=http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raptor74&page=1&cookie_test=1]GamePC[/link]
Read the review at [link=http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=raptor74&page=1&cookie_test=1]GamePC[/link]
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The benchmarks we've shown in the last few pages speak loudly, as the new Western Digital Raptor is undoubtedly the best performing Serial ATA/150 hard disk WD has ever released. Since the original Raptor was the previous performance king, the new 74GB Raptor just exceeds on the performance gains WD already has over the compeitition, as the WD740GD proves itself to be the best performing non-SCSI drive on the market. The performance gains made by the WD740GD were even better compared to what we were expecting and are impressive any way you look at them. On a drive-to-drive level, the 74GB Raptor is about 10% faster compared to the 36GB Raptor, which is quite an improvement considering they have the same spindle speed and cache amount.
The fact that Western Digital has also managed to make these drives quieter is also just as impressive. The Raptors no longer have their high-pitched whine (which honestly, wasn’t that bad, but was mildly annoying), making the WD740GD quiet enough for most silent PC systems. While Maxtor DiamondMax and Seagate Barracuda will still remain slightly quieter, the performance increase one will see over these drives with the 74GB Raptor will very much be worth the slight increase in noise and heat.