Customer Reviews

Western Digital WD1500AHFDRTL Raptor X 150GB SATA/150 Hard Drive

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Let's start with the only big flaw of this drive. The clear glass that allows you to see the drive. Great in theory, but not in practicality. To see the hard drive work you either need to mount it outside of the computer or to the glass on the side of your tower. Problem with that is that both methods void the warranty!!! There is really no way to view it working without voiding the warranty (read the manual) so minus 1 star for that. Of course they would only know this if you told them or sent the drive in an exterior case for repair!

I disagree with the review below about it being quiet. It is loud (in comparison to other drives)

Onto the positives. Fastest serial drive there is. 10,000 RPM with a 16 cache is the icing on the cake. I upgraded from the 74gig with 8 cache and what a difference. The price is high and raiding 2 of these together is only for the rich! But as far as hard drives go, this is the king of them all. I am a gamer and have been very please with the results. If you can afford it, it is the way to go. But consider the model without the window. You will save a few bucks and get the same performance

This drive (clear drive window) edition is a louder than the non-transparent one so you might want to take note of that. Also it it duhhh. more expensive. and like a previous reviewer said its not practical, even with the mounting technique to the side of the window, how often are you going to watch that platter spin @ 10,000 rpm and the actuator go bezerk? Its just a fancy thing but you shouldn't buy this one. I have two of the regular WD Raptors in a RAID0 config, and while its no where as noisy as a SCSI disc, you do hear the random accesses taking place. But it idle's like a regular 7,200 rpm quiet drive however. My previous SCSI was a Cheetah X15.1 which idle's louder than this accesses and also when its accessing it sounds like a needle scraping the platter @ 15,000 rpm! Not sure about the modern cheetah x15.5's in comparison with that, but this is good enough and you can build a faster array with these than the cheetahs for much less the price! With two of these i get 168 MB/s linear read on a Intel CH7-R chipset on the asus p5w dh dlx. Some might argue you might get the same linear read with other cheapter cavier drives or so, but this is much faster for random accesses so it seems more responsive, and because of that overall faster! Get it and tell WD thanks.

Pros:It works, it's fast and SATA is a plus.
Cons: Not much faster than a Seagate (7200, 32MB cache).It runs really hot!!

This hard drive is fat and reliable. If you can get this hard drive for less than a hundred, then its a steal,. Worth every penny! And if you have money to spend, go for the New VelociRaptor!

The price was great or I would not have purchased the upgrade. Performance is outstanding but the drive has a whine, high pitch during use. Would really be nice if WD made the SATA II version.

The Western Digital EIDE raptor enterprise series drives are the best of the E-IDE line of drives. I have bought and utilized several of these drives. I have found them to be quite reliable and at 10,000 rpm's the fastest of any E-IDE drive. I bought one of the very first drives of this line, the 34 GB drive, about 8 years ago and it is still going strong. You will not regret purchasing this drive!

Be honest, there isn't a single reputable review or computer labeled as "High End" or "Gaming" that doesn't have one (or two in raid) of these running as the bootable drive with the OS installed on it.

If you don't know why, it's because it is simply the fastest HDD on the consumer market. Don't need a 1TB drive for your most accessed drive, save it for your storage. The high speed these run at just make that much of an impact on routine, everyday tasks as well as the demanding, hungry programs and games.

The only thing I don't like about these drives?? It is the constant price instability that irks me. I can buy these all day for $150 (Raptor-X 150mb) each and then all the sudden no one is selling them for under $225.....then 6-7 weeks later back down, etc. etc..

If you are here trying to research drives, just make a note to add one of these and mark this component off your "to find" list.

In my opinion there is only one downfall to the Raptor, it is louder than a regular Hard Drive, I don't mind at all, but it is worth noting. Oh and unless you have a clear Hard Drive cage in your tower with a window, you are not going to be able to see through the nifty little plexiglass window on the Raptor X.
When I refer to best Hard Drive on the market I am directing this to those of you who have a lot of data that needs to be loaded; the Raptor will do this fast and with ease. I have two of these running in a raid 0 array, wow are they fast.

I am a Flight Simmer and for those of you who are not aware Flight Simulator has lots of data to load, I mean a lot! The two Raptors load FSX in about 20 seconds and Flight Sim 2004 in about 5, and I have many, many add-ons so these programs are not just their "Stock" size.

Simply put, if you want your computer to start up, load programs and just run, FAST, than look no further you have found your new hard drive. Also, the quality and warranty (5Years), are second to none for a product of this sort. Sure you could get a drive 4 times the size for the same or less cost; but if speed, efficiency, and quality are paramount in your computing world just buy one! Or two, or three... ;)

This drive is great for a cheap price. It is very fast, 10k rpm and 16mb cache. The clear Window on the drive looks amazing through my Clear windowed case on my computer. You can see all the actions of the drive, writing, reading(If you have a see-through case window). The speeds are amazing for gaming, but not really for data transfer. It only has a 1.5 gb / sec transfer rate as to a 3gb for 7,200rpm drives(Strange) but that does not slow down gaming for even a split second. This drive is a must for Graphics hungry games like Crysis, which now loads much faster and runs much less chopy.
The ONLY flaw with this drive is the sexy drive window. Since the drive is not housed in a all metal container, the window makes for a little more noise, but if you turn up your game volume you should be just fine.
5 stars!

This drive is great, the first 10,000 rpm drive I have owned and the performance increase over 7200rpm drives is significant. I am running this as my OS drive: Vista Ultimate 32bit, 2gigs of DDR3, and an Intel E6850, and this thing boots Vista up incredibly fast. Photoshop and other resource heavy apps also load a good bit quicker than with 7200rpm drives. I highly recommend this for your primary OS drive, you will be pleased with the increase in speed.

The drive is very loud, I am guessing due to the clear window design. If speed is your primary objective, this is your best bet, but if you want an ultra quiet system, this drive will disappoint you. A hard drive silencer may help. As for me...I love this drive!

If you are a talented modder, you could build a hard drive cage that sits on its side to show the clear window thru your case, so the window is not completely useless as some folks say. But it is a feature that most folks will never be able to take advantage of.

I can't wait till we start seeing these 10,000rpm SATA drives in larger sizes.