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Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA disk drive (2-Pack)

Monday, December 19th, 2005 | Hard Drives, Reviews

Western Digital disk drives have a good reputation for reliability and performance. The Western Digital Raptor disk drives allow new levels of performance from consumer oriented hard drives. With performance that matches that of parralell SCSI at a price thats right, the Raptors have the potential to skyrocket your hard drives disk writing and reading speeds.

This pair of drives is just a price saver, they are no different from the normal 74GB Western Digital Raptor disk drive that I’ve reviewed before.

Features…

• Name: Western Digital Raptor
• Size: 74GB
• Spindle speed: 10K RPM
• Buffer memory: 8MB
• Average read seek speed: 4.9msec
• Average write seek speed: 5.9msec
• Interface: Serial ATA-150

Instead of giving another full rundown of the Western Digital Raptor hard disk drive I’ll outline what benefits you can get from a pair.

Of course there is a major expense in getting two hard drives. That is always the hardest part for me and its especially true when the price of the drives gets this high. For the same price you could get a really huge hard drive with tons of space.

With SATA you usually get the option of RAID, using RAID, two drives work together as though they are one drive. There are two in use, but data is written as though there is only one physical drive.

Two options exist for RAID at the most basic level RAID 0 and RAID 1.

RAID 0 is a striping system, where the data is spread over the two drives. This gives fantastic performance as the data can be written to whichever drive is not busy at that time. The best place for this kind of setup is those doing something like video editing where bandwidth is important. Your drive size becomes the size of the two added together. The disadvantage of this setup is that there is not fault tolerance, so if one drive fails you lose all your data.

RAID 1 is a mirroring system. Both drive end up with identical data, so if one of them fails you do not lose all your data. It doesn’t provide any speed benefits over a single drive. You also only get the size of a single drive, so 2 74GB drives will yield 74GB. Best for data you can’t afford to lose.

These are the only two options available for 2 disks, you need 4 for other RAID options which provide a mix of performance and security but with the cost of 4 drives.

So if you want a performance increase with good security go for RAID 1, which is what I use. But if speed is essential, awesome performance can be had with the RAID 0 setup.

I highly recommend these drives for those who are looking for something to boost their already souped up computer.

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