Western Digital 150gb Raptor Review

This is the first of many hands-on reviews that you'll see me post. I've currently got about 7 to post up, but I'm starting with the most impressive one, the Western Digital 150gb Raptor.

When WD launched the first Raptor, it was 36.7gb large and had a SATA interface that was a joke in all honesty. It did spin at 10,000 RPM's so it blew the doors off every other drive out at the time. Fairly soon thereafter, the 74gb Raptor hit the streets, and has been the king of performance ever since. Yes you may read some review saying that the Raptor's life was destroyed by the likes of the Hitachi 500gb drive or the Seagate 7200.9, however the "seat of your pants" performance will always live in the Raptor family. There are certain intangibles that benchmarks just can't show you, like the effect of a seek time that is nearly half of the competition's. That's why I bring you both sides of the performance, the benchmarks and the real life effects. Keep in mind that the "seat of your pants" part of this review is totally my opinion, but I've played with a lot of drives, and this one is very special.

On the bench mark side, I ran a few tests with the drive before I started loading it up with data from my 250gb WD drive.

You can see the blue drive is my old Raptor, a 36.7gb model that is showing it's age. Granted a 74gb Raptor would be a better comparison, but this is the drive I'm moving up from. That will help out in the "seat of your pants" comparison.

I've used everything from 5gb SCSI drives to 40gb SATA's to the newest Seagate 7200.9 160gb drive which has the largest density of any 7200 rpm drive, maybe any drive ever. I've got extensive experience with each drive in the Raptor line, and even RAID-0 arrays of both the 36gb and 74gb. This new Raptor really blew my mind in the numbers it puts up. You can see the benifit of the revamped SATA controller in the burst speed. At 137mb/sec we're pretty much maxing out the 150mb/sec that the SATA-I interface offers. Should WD have gone with a SATA II 300 interface? Probably. With a large 16mb cache, SATA-II speeds can really help out in single-user applications, atleast in the "seat of your pants" area. This drive will not dissapoint though.

So that everyone knows before I get like 50 emails about how the drive I tested didn't live up to what it should produce, I'm going to spell out the Nate Solberg test bed as of today:

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum/SLI bios 3.7

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Winchester at 2.6ghz (10x260)

Kingston KVR400 2x512mb DDR-433 cas 2.5-3-3-7

nVidia Geforce 6800 400/800

Bluegears/HDA Digital X-Mystique 7.1 Sound Card with Dolby Digital Live

DVICO FusionHDTV 5 Plus

Thermaltake Purepower 480 TWV

Western Digital hard drives: 36.7gb Raptor, 150gb Raptor, 250gb JD-Series SATA-1

Lite-on DVD+-RW and Mitsumi 24x CD-RW

All testing was done on the nVidia controller, with and without NCQ enabled on the 150gb drive.

 

I understand that the Raptor line has evolved more than we've heard from the media. 36.7gb drives now have NCQ and the 74gb drives have undergone significant changes. My 36gb is probably one of the first generation, which is one reason it preforms so misserably. I must admit though, it never acted that way in daily use.

Now to the real world application, which is more important than numbers anyways. If you want some more, check out storagereview's writeup. I installed this drive today once I got home from work. I immediately copied all of my system drive's data over to it using Ghost. The transfer from the 36gb to the 150gb was pretty quick, moving at an average of 1533MB/min. For Ghost '03, that's about the best I've ever seen, especially when 20GB+  of data is involved. I booted back up my XP install and everything was there, but the boot was painfully slow. I'm not talking about a noticable wait, I'm talking about nearly 2 minutes of added time with nothing happening. This is probably because I didn't install Windows straight onto the drive, but I was able to remedy the situation by disabling NCQ. I can't guarantee if this is a nVidia driver issue or what, but I tried reinstalling the nForce drivers, and it did not help a bit. Maybe someone more knowing can tell me what's up.

I started playing around, and noticed immediately that folder contents were coming up faster, and in folders that had a lot of pictures or videos, load time was reduced noticably. I have nearly 300gb of media on this machine, and waiting to see it has always ticked me off about this machine. Should this drive be the heart of your new HTPC? Probably so. Even despite the large cost issue, and the limited space, getting three or four of these babies in a RAID-5 array would be ideal for the HTPC market. I would hate to throw down a ton of cash on a new HTPC and have to wait around for my images to load or my videos to show previews.

Although it's tough to compare certain things like load times for iTunes and Firefox, everything feels more responsive. I tried out a little BF2 action, which has always been the hardest on my hard drive, and was very happy with the results. A noticable step up in level load time, and also a very much more responsive system when I exit the game. "Seat of the pants" is way up there.

So overall my first few hours with this drive have been a little slice of heaven. A lot of people will probably ask "Is it worth $300?" and my answer is a very decidedly "YES." This thing will hang with a RAID-0 of 2 74gb's all day. It's price is also very competitive, considering 2 74gb Raptors will cost you atleast $300, and probably won't perform as well as this single drive does. I guess the thing to play with after this will have to be a pair. I can't wait to build someone that rig