Verdict: The world's first genuinely exciting hard disk
Everyone knows Raptors were scary dinosaurs. Fast and vicious, they were deadly when they went out on RAIDs together - just like the Western Digital hard disk of the same name. Sadly for lovers of vicious dinosaurs, the reptilian Raptor is long extinct, and it seemed as though WD's hard disk was going the same way too.
The original Raptor stole some of the best aspects of SCSI technology and brought them across to S-ATA. In particular, its rotational speed of 10,000rpm gave a 40 per cent throughput and access time benefit over 7,200rpm drives. Spinning the platters faster is only one way of speeding up disk performance, however, and the Raptor was showing its age in other ways. The 36GB and 74GB Raptors had 37GB per platter, but we're now seeing disks with as much as 160GB per platter. Having four times as much data packed into the same area - a higher areal density - can benefit performance more than spin speeds.
With their greater areal density, standard 7,200rpm disks have been getting close to the Raptor's sustained throughput, and have far exceeded it in capacity as well. To regain its crown, the new Raptor needed something special and fortunately WD has obliged. Even better, the company has recognised the considerable interest in the Raptor from the enthusiast community. Whereas we can now buy PC cases in almost any colour, hard disks have continued to look like sardine cans. The new Raptor changes this, as it comes in two models: the standard '150', and the X version, which sports a clear window.
At first glance, the window looks a little weedy, as it only reveals the central portion of the top platter's surface and the section where the head moves. However, once you see the insane speed of the heads as they skitter about, you're more impressed (there's some great video at www.wdraptorx.com). No interior lighting is provided, but some well-placed exterior LEDs should reflect nicely off the shiny interior.
Aside from the window, the three key improvements of the new Raptor X are its areal density, capacity and cache, all of which have been doubled in size over the original Raptor, with 75GB per platter for a total of 150GB, and a 16MB cache. Strangely, the new Raptor still uses the 150MB/sec S-ATA interface, but has NCQ support bolted on. In the real world, this isn't a serious issue, as no drives come close to the 150MB/sec ceiling of S-ATA's first generation. It's also worth mentioning that this drive has one of the highest acoustic ratings we've seen, although we didn't find it particularly noisy during testing. The reason for its noise is the window, as the regular Raptor 150 is rated 10dBA lower, when idle and when seeking.
Given the Raptor's heritage, we were expecting its performance to be as savage as a real Raptor. Things started well, with one of the fastest Windows installations we've seen, but the HD Tach 3 RW results blew us away. The average read throughput of 88.8MB/sec is 24MB/sec ahead of the 74GB Raptor, although write performance wasn't quite so far ahead. Breaking this down to inner and outer zones showed that reading didn't drop below 58MB/sec (faster than the average throughput of most 7,200rpm drives), while writing didn't go below 51.7MB/sec.
However, the actual performance advantage wasn't as pronounced as the synthetic figures suggest. Our Far Cry level load was completed in 50.5 seconds, just pipping the previous fastest drive, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, by half a second. The Paint Shop Pro result was also the fastest we've seen, though only by around 1 per cent. But, considering that the hard disk has relatively little effect on general application performance, this isn't an insignificant amount.
CONCLUSION
Western Digital had to do something radical to make the Raptor king of S-ATA disks again, and the company has delivered. However, the Raptor X can't compete with 7,200rpm disks on price. At £1.75 per GB, it's expensive, even compared with 500GB disks. If you don't care about the window then the Raptor 150 is a better choice, as it costs £200 and offers twice the MTBF, so your data is twice as secure. But we know you'll buy the Raptor X anyway, because it's the disk that embodies the meaning of the Raptor name: it's fast, vicious and now perverse enough to make you watch as it dispatches your data with the gusto of a born killer.
