WD Raptor

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The WD740GD

The WD Raptor is a high-end hard disk drive series produced by Western Digital that created its own niche in the enthusiast and small-server market. Traditionally, servers relied on hard drives featuring a SCSI interface because of their advantages in both performance and reliability over consumer-level ATA drives.

Although pitched as an "enterprise class drive" it won favour with the PC gaming & enthusiast community because the drive was capable of speeds usually only found on more expensive SCSI drives, whilst adopting the SATA interface that meant it could be used easily on all modern motherboards with no separate (and often expensive) controller card. Integration was made easier still by the inclusion of a standard 4-pin Molex power connector in addition to the standard SATA power port, meaning users of older PSUs were not alienated.

Despite having been in production since early 2003 there have been no directly competing products launched in the same market, and as such the drives are regarded as "must have" in any PC enthusiast/gaming system.

More recently Western Digital acknowledged the primary consumer of its Raptor brand drives by releasing a revision of its flagship 150GB drive with a perspex window, in keeping with the PC modding trend of stylizing the internals of PC cases, allowing the user to see the drives inner workings while it was in operation.

1 The WD360GD
2 The WD740GD
3 The WD1500
4 Models and revisions
5 References
6 Official links
7 External Links

[edit] The WD360GD

In 2003, the first incarnation of the Raptor series: the WD360GD^[1]. It featured a capacity of 36 GB on a single platter, a Serial ATA interface and was the first ATA drive to operate at a spindle speed of 10,000 revolutions per minute. Like many early SATA drives, the Raptor was not a "real" SATA drive because it was really an PATA drive that used an 88i8030C interface bridge chip from Marvell. However, this fact did not significantly hamper the Raptor's performance.

As is usually the case for hard drives featuring a faster spindle speed, the Raptor outperformed other ATA drives and in some situations was able to even reach the performance of contemporary 10,000 rpm SCSI drives. SCSI drives still outperformed the Raptor in multi-user scenarios, but for high-end home computers it fared very well. For enthusiasts' systems, the Raptor also had the key advantages of low noise and temperature levels compared to similarly performing drives.

All WD360GD drives with Part Number WD360GD-00FNA0 (December 2003) and earlier cannot accept SATA latch cables as the SATA data connector does not have the required rails.So SATA latch cables cannot fit to the connector and only normal cables can be installed...

Like its larger brother the WD740GD, the WD360GD was revised in 2006 and released with the designation WD360ADFD - incorporating twice as much onboard cache (16MB vs 8MB) and enabling NCQ.

[edit] The WD740GD

The second generation Raptor was introduced in early 2004, featuring two platters for 74 GB of storage space. Unlike its predecessor, the WD740GD didn't use ball bearings to support the spinning disks, but rather used fluid dynamic bearings. These allowed the new Raptor to operate at a noise level comparable to the quieter 7,200 rpm drives.

Another advantage the WD740GD had over its predecessor was Tagged Command Queueing, a feature that had previously only been available in SCSI drives. Command queueing resulted in a notable increase in the WD740GD's multi-user performance -- a key discipline where its predecessor failed compared to SCSI drives. However, enabling command queueing on the WD740GD resulted in a performance decrease in single-user scenarios. It is worth noting that as of 2005, only a few SATA controllers can fully support command queueing. This drive became immensely popular in high-end gaming systems because of these features.

In 2006 Western Digital revised the WD740GD specification and released the WD740ADFD, ostensibly the same drive but with 16MB of onboard cache. Support for TCQ (rarely supported on SATA RAID controllers) was dropped in favour of NCQ, and at the same time replacing the sata-to-pata bridge controller chip with a native sata controller.

[edit] The WD1500

The third generation Raptor was released by Western Digital in January 2006. It features two 75 GB platters (for a total of 150GB) and a more advanced system of Native Command Queuing. At the same time, the consumer-oriented WD Raptor X was released, without some of the enterprise-level features of the standard Raptor but with the addition of a clear polycarbonate window in the drive cover, making the movements of the disks and magnetic heads visible. This unique feature is likely to be popular with case modders. Because of the clear window, the Raptor X has an MTBF rating of 600,000 hours (68.5 years), whereas the normal Raptor has an MTBF double of that (1.2 million hours or 137 years). However, this shouldn't be too great a concern as both drives are covered by a five-year warranty. While this drive is using the SATA 2 feature NCQ, it lacks support for the increased bandwidth of SATA 2.

[edit] Models and revisions

Model no.	Released	Capacity	Cache	Interface	Featureset	Notes	Product Page
WD360GD	2003	36GB	8MB	Parallel ATA to Serial ATA bridge	–	–	WD Site
WD740GD	2004	74GB	8MB	Parallel ATA to Serial ATA bridge	TCQ	–	WD Site
WD360ADFD	2006	36GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	–	WD Site
WD740ADFD	2006	74GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	–	WD Site
WD1500ADFD	2006	150GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	–	WD Site
WD1500AHFD	2006	150GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	Raptor X variant	wdraptorx.com
Special models
WD800ADFD	2006	80GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	Available only in HP and Dell OEM systems	HP.com Dell.com
WD1600ADFD	2006	160GB	16MB	Native SATA	NCQ	Available only in HP and Dell OEM systems	HP.com Dell.com