Thread: Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD - more prominent, quicker, firmer.

WesternDigital has earned themselves rather a reputation in the calculationEnthusiast market with their line of Raptor hard repels. in thefirst place targeted as "Enterprise class" SATA variants ofwhat WD had historically contributed to market for high-end SCSI hostmemory results, the ten K RPM Raptor was an overnight success for enduser functioning freaks, admitting lots of us.


WD's1st looping of the repel was a somewhat overly-svelte thirty-six GBdition that arrive outfitted with an eight MB cache. And it wasreally not what one would term a "native SATA" repel, witha Marvell PATA to SATA bridge chip handling calls for the repels SATA1.5GBps interface back into what was basically a PATA circuitblock.The second approach of the Raptor (yes it was near god-like tosome), marked a welcomed gain in capacity to seventy-four GB, with acouple of thirty-six GB platters within.





Therepel retained the bridge chip for its SATA interface, but modifiedfirmware along with quieter useable acoustics and overall improvefunctioning, only offered more of a beneficial thing. Plugging apair of Raptor WD740s into a RAID 0 array was getting commonplace inlots Gaming Rigs and high-end Workstations. no matter, theunsatiable need for more memory capacity marches on, along with theneed-for-speed; it nearly goes without saying.


Withhuge capacity repels like Hitachi's 7K500 coming in the market, aswell as novel advances in three GBps SATA ports speeds and othertechnologies like NCQ (native command queuing), Western Digital hadto solution the call. Their answer? The novel Raptor WD1500 series,which we'll be measuring today.In addition to the novel RaptorWD1500's apparent enhancements in capability and a more prominentcache, the repel boasts a elite new additions to itscharacteristic-set, some of which are specifically targeted at RAIDapps.