This Western Digital drive is the fastest SATA drive that we have ever
received. This SATA drive meant for data centers, NAS devices and applications
where you need fast I/O speed.
This 150 GB hard drive has a spindle speed of 10,000 rpm and a memory buffer
of 16 MB. It can be used to create your own NAS box having better data transfer
rate and availability. The drive only supports SATA-I, where as now almost all
drives are coming with SATA II.
Price: Rs 17,500 (5 yrs warranty) |
Key Specs: 150GB, 10K rpm, 16MB cache |
Contact: Champion Computers, Delhi Tel: 26214751Email id: champion@usa.net |
Coming to its performance, we tested this drive on an Athlon FX -55 system
with 512 MB RAM. We compared it with Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 drive (reviewed in
January 2006 issue of PCQuest ), having an rpm of 7200 and a capacity of 400 GB.
The Western Digital RaptorX was better than the Seagte drive in every
benchmarking score. The average data transfer rate of the Seagate drive was 66.5
MBps, whereas Western Digital drive scored 74.6 MBps, showing a diffrence of
about 8 MBps.
In Business Disk Winmark 99 and the High-End Disk Winmark 99, Western Digital
RaptorX performed better, scoring 24.7 MBps and 46.7 MBps respectively. Whereas
in the same benchmarks, the Seagate drive was able to score only 19.8 and 45.1
MBps. However, the Raptor gave us higher CPU utilization of 91.4 % but a lower
disk access time of 8 ms. On the other hand, Seagate showed a higher disk access
time of 11.7 ms.
Bottom line: The Western Digital Raptor X is surely the fastest in the
SATA catagory, but on the other hand, it has a high CPU utilization. The drive
will be highly beneficial for the multimedia experts and all the data transfer
rate-conscious systems like Netwok Attached Storage System.
Anubhav Verma