Western Digital officially won the heart of the enthusiast with their Raptor drives- they were the first non-SCSI hard drives that could spin at 10,000RPM and thus, produce some speedy results. It started with their 36GB version which was followed by the 74GB version and today, WD doubles that storage again to 150GB. However, doubling the storage capacity isn’t the only thing new on the latest Raptor. WD has also doubled the cache buffer which is now up from 8MB to 16MB and adds NCQ (Native Command Queuing) support.

The new Raptor also has something added to it in terms of looks- WD adds a window on top of the drive and you can now actually see the disk spinning and the head moving. While that offers nothing in terms of performance, it does make the drive look very cool. Click here to see a small video of the drive in action (11.2MB). Lets take a look at some of the specifications of the drive before we move on to benchmarking.

Interface	Serial ATA
Read/Write Seek Time	4.6ms / 5.2ms
Average Rotational Latency	2.99ms
Spindle Speed	10,000RPM
Capacity	150GB
Cache Size	16MB
Platter Size	75GB
Idle/Seek Acoustic	39dBA, 46dBA
Idle/Read-Write Power Consupmtion	9.19W 10.02W
Warranty	5 Years

We used the following test bench to measure the performance of this drive and compared it against the 74GB Raptor as well as an 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 drive which spins at 7200RPM and has an 8MB cache.

CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ CPU
Memory:	2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 Memory Module
Motherboard:	DFI nForce4 SLI DR
Optical Drive:	LiteOn DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
Monitor:	LG 19" CRT Monitor
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional SP2
VGA Drivers:	nVidia Forceware 81.98
Testing Software:	PC Mark 2005 Hard Drive, Sandra File System, HD Tach Game Load Times: Far Cry, Quake 4, Unreal Tournament 2004 PC World Worldbench Application Loading/Benchmarking