Introduction

When Western Digital first let rumours fly back some three years ago of a desktop hard drive that would operate at 10,000RPM (something that was reserved for the server market) tongues were wagging, hoping to see this come to fruition. Western Digital didn’t disappoint, and so the Raptor series was born.

The original Raptor series come in two flavours - a 36GB and a 74GB model. They used server platters, drive motor and heads but the SCSI interface was replaced with Serial ATA interface. These drives managed to slaughter any other hard disk on the market, simply because of the extra RPM speeds they were capable of pushing out. While they were fast, there was simply one problem - price. You could buy two 250GB drives for what one of the 74GB Raptor drives would cost - price per GB, they were the most expensive drives available.

Now we come to today’s world, where pure speed isn’t everything. Today a 74GB Raptor is slower than some of the 7200RPM SATA-II drives with NCQ, so something had to be done to give the Raptor some more bite and possibly take back the market reputation of being the quickest thing money can buy.

Western Digital has been working on this for the past year, and now we have seen the release of a new member into the Raptor family dubbed the Raptor-X. What does this drive have to offer? Let’s have a look.