Western Digital Raptor WD360

For a long time, IDE drives have been stuck at 7200 rpm spindle speed. With the Raptor, Western Digital has finally broken that barrier and brought the first 10,000 rpm IDE hard drive. We tested the drive on a P4 3 GHz machine with an Intel 865 motherboard having onboard SATA, 512 MB DDR RAM and nVidia Geforce 4 graphics card. We compared the drive’s performance against two 7200 rpm SATA drives from Maxtor and Seagate (see table), both of which were also tested on the same test bed. We got a mix of interesting results from the drive. As far as raw throughputs are concerned, the Raptor lived up to its name, giving better performance than the other two. Here, the interesting point to note was that while the drive’s outer zone transfer rates (transfer rate start) weren’t very high compared to the other two, it outperformed them as it moved towards the inner zones (transfer rate end). The drive also showed better access time. In the real world benchmarks, the results were mixed. It was better than Seagate in high-end disk Winmark but lower than the Maxtor, and was also lower than both in Business Disk Winmark. This is also reflected in the real live application benchmarks, where it scored the lowest in Business Winstone 2001, but was at par in Content Creation Winstone 2001. 

S N   A   P   S   H O   T Price : Rs 8,250 Key specs : Good performer but a bit expensive Contact : Western Digital, Mumbai  Tel : 25884538  E-mail : Ajay.Kapure@wdc.com

Though the drive comes with a five-year warranty, its per GB cost of Rs 230 is high. Overall, a very good drive as far as raw throughputs and access times are concerned.

Geetaj Channana