| Western Digital Raptor WD740GD |
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There isn't a whole lot to say about this drive that hasn't been said twice over. We put it through the paces and we came to the predicted conclusion of excellent performance. The Raptor easily beat the competition in every benchmark we threw at it, and considering this drive is now over two years old, that is impressive to say the least. Technically this drive is aimed at the enterprise market, however it seems a lot of computer enthusiasts have made it their top pick for their primary PC, and that won't be any exception as this drive will now be used in my personal test system.
Not so fast though, there are downsides. First off this drive is louder then your average drive, when the drive is under load it is actually louder than the stock AMD CPU fan used in this review running at low speed, but it isn't annoyingly loud the least bit. Second is the price point, while it has come down a lot since its release date, it's still a little pricey at about $170 USD as of this article date. At that price you could pick yourself up a new 250GB hard drive with money to spare. Even though we at TWL believe the price point of this drive is well worth the buy for the performance you receive, it really comes down to personal preference on deciding which is more important, performance or capacity.
Lastly, the drive IS two years old. We think it's about time for Western Digital to release something newer and better. We aren't one to dip into rumors much but we can't help ourselves to say that there is one going around saying a new Raptor may be announced in the near future, with a 16MB buffer, Serial ATA II, Native Command Queuing, and 148 gigabytes of capacity. Personally, I hope it's true, but I suppose time will tell.
Despite the higher than average price, being just a little bit louder, and being two years old. Even though this is called an enterprise drive, we think it's well worth your buy if you want the best of the best desktop hard drive to date. We recommend this drive.
