The Raptor remains a formidable drive on performance alone. While some 7200rpm disks have broken the 60MB/s STR barrier, notably the Samsung, Western Digital hasn’t sat on its laurels with the 65MB/s WD740GD (the previous Raptor): the new 150GB Raptor X raises the speed bar.

Not only this, but a clear window in the top of the disk puts the top platter and read/write head on show for all to see. The speed at which the head moves is quite a sight to behold.

The 2.99ms latency means average seek time is easily the quickest on test – we measured it as 5.11ms. Although it remains way behind others here, the Raptor X’s 75GB platters hold twice the amount of data as the WD740GD’s, which meant that the average STR was boosted to an amazing 78MB/s.

Doubling the buffer memory to 16MB has no doubt aided performance too. Running our Photoshop benchmark on the Raptor X took just 5 mins, 6 secs – a clear 8 seconds ahead of the Samsung.

In our file-copy tests, the Raptor beat everything in all tests bar the small file-reading test where the Hitachi edged ahead by 0.5MB/s. Ultimately, though, the Raptor X is the fastest hard disk on test by a good margin.

At $2.70 per gigabyte, it’s also the most expensive, and even the identical but non-windowed version (WD1500ADFD) is still pricey at over $2 per gigabyte. If you can afford it, the Raptor X won’t disappoint, but the Samsung is much better value, albeit slower overall.