Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB Hard Drive (Serial ATA, 10,000 RPM, 16MB)

Reviewed by: Sin91

Duration of ownership: 1 Month

Strengths: I have used many hard drives and this is the fastest by far. I upgraded from a SATA 7200rpm and the speed of my PC tripled.

Weaknesses: None that I have found. The price is a little high but the performance is so great that I will probably get another one and set up RAID.

Overall: This is an amazing hard drive. It is the fastest hard drive I have ever used. The hard drive can be the bottleneck in PC performance so a fast hard drive is a must-have for people who want a fast PC. The WD Raptor is the hard drive of choice for overclockers, gamers, PC enthusiasts, or people who just want a fast system.

Reviewed by: garrek99

Strengths: It's a normal HD, not that different from other good quality 7200 RPM 16BM cache HDs.

Weaknesses: LOUD, LOUD, LOUD.

Overall: It performs well but just not that much better than a good 16Mb cache 7200RPM hard drive. You would definitely be better off with 2x160GB 7200RPM HDs in RAID and it would be cheaper too. Regret purchasing because it is super loud. It screams like a dying pig.SiSoft Sandra benchs show that there are some 7200RPM HDs that out perform this drive and everything and anything in RAID kicks this HD's butt.

Reviewed by: tkilljoy

Strengths: High Speed, SATA, Decent Storage.

Weaknesses: Size and Price

Overall: I've had this fella tooling along in a rather oversized performance machine. It's been a bit over a year now of running this hard for anywhere from 6-14 hours every day without a hitch.It can produce a bit more noise then a normal hard drive that one might be used to, but that is the trade off of the higher speed performance this drive provides, and it is certainly a noticeable increase in performance. Side by side with another system running on Western Digital Caviars, this guy gets the boot done faster.The real downside is of course, the 150gb size. if you need a ton of space, one or two of these as your boot drive/raid with a larger storage drive is the best way to go. If you can afford the cost, raid0 as many of these together as your system can support, the burst speed is incredible when multiple drives are working in tandem (raid5 is the best trick if you can make it happen!)I punish this drive i admit, it sits tight between other HDs in a case that puts out an immense amount of heat (four video cards (quad-SLI), physx processor, overclocked processor, etc) and it is regularly riding higher than normal temps due to sucking in toasted ambient air, its been over a year and it's faithfully taking care of the job still.the price is a bit rough, but acceptable for a consumer market.. i'd recommend this guy for anyone who needs decent performance, whether a gamer or a designer!

Reviewed by:

Strengths: Having read the reviews during the 1st two quarters of 2004, I could wait no longer and purchased my Raptor for my home PC (running WIN XP Pro), and have been "pleased as punch" ever since.

Weaknesses: Haven't noticed any so far - over two-and-a-half years you may recall, from above.

Overall: The only regret I can provide is that I started out "small" with a 36GB model. ;-)But as Western Digital has now decided that it's about time to produce a "heavyweight" model - 150GB - I'm thinking that if I have enough from my tax return, it may be time to acquire a little more storage/speed. I work in the civil engineering design field, and so using AutoCAD's Land Enabled Map to open a 48MB dwg file in a little over 8 seconds is a pretty significant indicator of the speed of my Raptor. That was in concert with an AMD64 3200 and 1GB of RAM, along with the Raptor.

Reviewed by: MacAddictedForever

Strengths: Fastest SATA, less expensive than similar speed from SCSI

Weaknesses: Makes a good small random read/write for boot, not for huge files

Overall: I have been using this drive in a RAID 0 as a boot drive on my PowerMac G5 for quite some time with a Firmtek SATA PCI card to bypass the native SATA. (Newer Mac Pro's won't need the PCI card.)The speed and 300GB storage size is very ideal and FAST!With my huge collection of movies, tv shows and music from iTunes, the response of these RAID O Raptor drives is awesome.I would advise one Rator 150GB as a boot drive and larger drive like 500GB for a file drive if your budget or needs doesn't call for the risks of a RAID O.

Reviewed by: hivenetsolution

Strengths: nothing

Weaknesses: all of data crushed

Overall: I heard this maker's HDD was horrible. it became true to me. I have slightly one year old 150gb HDD. but Oneday, all of data is gone even though I tried to use restore program to back up. Do not buy. you will suffer, I have another HDD for more 3 years. still working good. I become to know why they put third party HDD recovery service on their web site.