Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD1500ADFD 150GB Hard Drive

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have 2 of these in RAID-0, they literally saturate the sata-1 bus @ 150mbps. Would of been better if these drives support SATA-II at the time they were released...Can get rather noisy in a quiet environment (sounds like some slugs in a plasticbox being shaked) when heavily accessed..but atleast the audible frequencies are in the lower spectrum and doesn't have the high pitch sound that comes from my 15,000 rpm SCSI Seagate Cheetah, which is much slower than this although made since 2000. Don't go for the raptor-X infront of this one, as that one has a lower MTBF, is more audible (due to the special cover), and is entirely more expensive, unless that's what you want ofcourse. They are otherwise, identical in performance.

Drive works great...replaced two 36gb Raptors with this one. Have not used it in a RAID setup but I noticed better performance with the 16mb cache over the 36gb Raptor which only had an 8mb cache.

I've been reading lately about solid state disc(SSD) drives making their way to the consumer market. With no moving parts they would be much more quite then the drives we use now, are super fast, but they also cost their weight in gold. A 32GB SanDisk SSD drive will run you over a grand! Until those prices drop I'll stick with a hard disc drive, thank you very much! :D

As far as the Raptor goes I couldn't be happier with its performance. The price isn't bad and the read/write times are impressive. Right now I'm only running one of these but in the near future plan on running a dual boot system and using two of these for the OS's and essential programs. My 2x TB drives will hold all my movies and other media.(Hi-Def media really eats up the HD space quickly, I still remember when a Gig was a ton of space!)

One of Vistas touted features is ReadyBoost or using a jump drive, but when you have a Raptor theres no need. I saw no noticeable improvement in access times when using ReadyBoost, the 4GB Corsair Voyager GT actually seemed slower than when using the Raptor.

While the Raptors are far from silent(Samsungs Spinpoint drives are very quiet!) I wouldn't say they are loud. My Liteon DVD drive is much noisier then my Raptor so I have no complaints. I'm hoping in the future WD releases larger than 150GB drives so I can just use them in place of 7200RPM drives, time will tell. While the price premium of a 10kRPM drive wont appeal to everyone, I think the small increase is worth it to enthusiasts looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their setup. Recommended!

This is a great drive. 10,000RPMS loads up everything quick, and i have never seen anything that you could compare to the speed of this Raptor. Great Drive.

I guess I was expecting miraculous speeds, but if there is a speed increase you won't notice it. If you really need or want increased speed SSDs are probably the way to go.

First of all, if it makes any difference to you, these are white label drives; same specs as WD Raptor, but the label and enclosure is slightly different and they do not say Western Digital Raptor.

2 years ago, I bought 2 of these and configured them in RAID 0. After a few months, they became noisy and I decided to separate them and use them as independent drives. I no longer have any benchmarking details, but I was dissatisfied with the performance given the cost. I would suggest doing some research on this. From what I have read since, you are much likely to get better performance for the buck buying a lower performance larger capacity hard drive (search short stroking).

Of the 2 drives, one is only moderately loud (about how it was new) and the other is very loud. I have them backed up and continue to use them as non-system drives. The louder drive has been giving off the characteristic drive is about to fail noise for quite some time and not failed.

I have since purchased a 300GB Velociraptor WD300HLFS, an improved version of this and been somewhat happier; it is much quieter and has been running as my system drive virtually 24/7 for well over a year with no issues. However, I want to stress that the performance gain is only marginal over cheaper drives. I would recommend paying for Velociraptors for their reliability. If you are going for performance, do a little research first.

The Raptor was the first non SCSI drive to operate above the 7,200RPM speed, at 10,000RPM. I have had mine for years now and it works great. If you care about speed and can get the 150GB Raptor cheap it's a great choice. However, the 150GB and 300GB Velociraptor are now available, and are even faster. So unless you can still get the original Raptor real cheap, I'd opt for the Velociraptor.