Why are we reviewing something that is a mere 36GB? Simple -- because this one drops access times and pumps up the transfer rate. Not targeted at the home user, the 36GB WD Raptor is marketed as an enterprise-level SATA drive -- the fastest drive on offer by WD. Capacity becomes an afterthought for the Raptor with its 10,000rpm spindle concerning itself with speed, resulting in seek times of around 5.2ms, compared to the 8.9ms of a 7,200rpm drive.
Western Digital pitches this drive squarely against the SCSI market, with the Raptor comparing favourably against equivalent 15,000rpm SCSI drives, which can easily cost twice as much.
This drive also carries a five year manufacturer's warranty, the high number due to its potential participation in mission-critical enterprise systems.
Its size will limit how attractive this drive can get in its bare form, but in the world of servers, smaller drives have a notable place in RAID arrays. But we’re still thinking that this zippy speed has potential for disk intensive tasks right at home -- things like video editing should get a serious kick from 10,000rpm.
Its down-size is not only its down-side. The Raptor is not intended for office-application use. The extra hard disk speed will assist in the opening of files, and will speed up virtual memory access, but in the days of PCs with half a gig of RAM, this is less important, meaning the Raptor will often not give a significant benefit over a 7,200rpm drive.
The Raptor comes with a SATA cable, SATA host adaptor card, installation guide, Data Lifeguard Utility software for Serial ATA and Serial ATA host adaptor card installation drivers. But does it come with the ‘oh I want’ feeling for your desktop?
For the same price, you can lay your hands on a 120GB 7,200rpm SATA drive –- that’s over three times as big. And remember, IDE is even cheaper.
It would be nice to have a drive that can reach these speeds -- but the WD Raptor honestly feels like a little sports car. It’s expensive and it can impress, but a bigger and slightly slower one can do the same job for a lot less. This drive is pitched for business use, and unless 10,000rpm can really make a difference, home users should wait until 10,000rpm becomes a desktop paradigm. For the moment, 7,200rpm and its large capacity will remain the most cost effective storage model for home computing.