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Untitled Document
Western Digital Raptor
| Manufacturer |
Western Digital |
| Model |
Raptor |
| Interface |
SATA 150 |
| Nominal
Capacity |
36 GB |
74 GB |
| Rotational
Speed |
10 000 RPM |
10 000 RPM |
| Cache Size |
8 MB |
8 MB |
| Price (inc.
VAT) |
£71.64 |
£119.97 |
| Retailer |
|
|
| Formatted
Capacity |
34 GB |
69 GB |
| Cost per
GB |
£2.11 |
£1.74 |
| PC Mark
2004 Score |
5215 |
5604 |
| Average
Seek time |
6.4ms |
5.96ms |
| Typical
Running Temperature |
43c |
43c |
The Raptor is currently the only 10,000 rpm SATA hard drive
on the market. As well as offering extremely fast linear read speeds, they
also have very low seek times. Unfortunately, some compromises have been made
to achieve this performance.
The drive is available in two sizes, 36 GB and 74 GB. By today’s standards,
both of these are embarrassingly small. The 36 GB model is barely adequate for
a basic workstation, and even the 74 GB model isn't enough. Value for money
is also poor, as you would expect of high performance hardware like this. The
price per megabyte is four times the average.
Quite surprisingly, the 10,000 rpm spindle speed does not result in any more
heat or noise, compared with a 7200 rpm drive. Although they are expensive high
performance drives, the Raptors are more than civilized enough to be used in
a desktop machine. The low capacity of these drives makes them most suitable
for a small web server, or used in a workstation alongside a bigger and cheaper
disk to store the less often used data. If you must have the very best in performance,
you could assemble a RAID array of Raptors, and both the benchmark scores and
the price would be astronomical.
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