Western Digital Raptor® WD360GD 36.7 GB SATA Hard Drive

Pros: Fast, quiet (for a 10k RPM drive)
Cons: Small capacity, gets very hot, expensive

Why the name "Raptor"? It isn't huge. It's fast! Why not a Cheetah? Oh, I think we just infringed on Seagate's trademark. :) Crap... Well, enough with the Sienfeld-like observations. I would NOT have picked these up if they weren't at least ...

Pros: Fast. Excellent warrantee. Fast. No, I mean *really* fast.
Cons: expensive. Hot. Makes your other hard drives feel pathetic.

It's been a fun ride in the desktop hardware bix these past few years, and it's pretty interesting to see how speed and technology have incrementally advanced. Most of my current business centers around "performance" desktop machines, specifically ...

Pros: Easy Installation
Cons: Absolutely horrible performance; WD support is totally worthless

Two and a half months ago, I purchased a new DFI LanParty motherboard utilizing the latest in Serial ATA (SATA) disk drive attachment interface with an imbedded RAID controller. Since I'm building a video capture system, I need lots of very fast, ...

Pros: Fantastically fast, good capacity, very well built drive, designed for power users
Cons: requires PCI card and SATA cables to use, sometimes loud, not for casual users

Let me start by saying I have hideously bad luck with hard drives. I drive my computer hard, 24 hour ...

Pros: Fast
Cons: Fragile

I bought one of these Serial ATA drives for a customer of mine. Straight from the package it was bro ...

Pros: FAST FAST FAST, SCSI performance without SCSI price - SATA, 10000RPM
Cons: low capacity - the end

Now that I raved a little about the product, I will get to the details. Capacity: This is not ...

Pros: Fast! 5 year Warranty.
Cons: Runs quite hot, a bit on the noisy side, pricey.

I finally broke down and got one of these when I was building a new computer for myself. I never thought I would be so impressed. After getting a faster processor, more RAM and a better video card I tried things out on my old 7200RPM hard drive. Yes ...

Pros: 10,000 RPM. 8MB cache Both standard ATX power and "serial Ata power" Quiet
Cons: Cost?? SATA??

The drive is quiet and fast. Gamers, Video editors, and hardcore computer geeks have been wanting a ...

Pros: It's easy to install and runs very fast and quiet!
Cons: I had nothing bad to say about this drive until a few days ago...

When I first installed this baby it ran smooth and quiet!
It was a very exciting event.....but how long will it last?

I've been using it for two weeks and I'm experiencing some weird things. The drive makes a clicking sound upon boot up. (clicks at a steady tempo) The drive will not boot....message in DOS window says "failure to recognize disk" and "failure to boot from disk".

Strange enough as it is, it boots up fine when the tower is laid on its side. Something internal? Sounds like it....
I hope that this is a rare case since the performance has been excellent so far! If anyone has experienced the same scenario and can help>>>please share any info.

Pros: SPEED warranty SPEED quite SPEED
Cons: Heat

The Western Digital Raptor, 36.7 GB Hard Drive was built for speed. I mean that this is insanely fast. At 10000RPM and the average data seek as fast as 4.5ms because of this my games load levels so fast it is astonishing. The only sound coming from this speed demon is an insignificant whine, which surprised me enormously. As for installing the Raptor these drives install into any ordinary 3.5 inch bay and its doesn’t require sata power cables. It also comes with a Western Digital five-year warranty. The one problem with the Raptor is how surprisingly hot it gets at first, but if you have high-quality cooling for it it will chill down rather quickly. I have installed an extra 80MM fan to keep it cool. Overall this is too good not to buy. I recommend this to all gamers.

Pros: Ease of installation Speed
Cons: Seek/write noise

I purchased this drive to use as the primary drive to replace a 30.7 GB, 7,200 rpm Maxtor drive that was starting to squeal (yeh, scary!). The Maxtor drive was a factory replacement for one that had crashed so I couldn't get the Raptor installed fast enough.

I would have preferred a larger drive, but I plan to get a second high capacity drive for data storage soon so it wasn't really critical.


The drive is definitely faster that the Maxtor, but it is noticeably noisier than the old drive. I really wasn't aware of the mechanics of the Maxtor while it is distractingly evident in the Raptor.


I will probably get a Western Digital SATA data cord to go with it (rather than the data cords that came with the motherboard). The WDC cords have a wide clamp type plug that looks as though it would seat more firmly and prevent the kind of "wimpy" connections mentioned in another review.


Bottom Line: I like the drive, and I would probably buy it again if I had to do it all over again.

Pros: Lightning quick response!
Cons: For some people, these may be a little noisy at times.

The "guts" of my current system consist of the following:
a pair of Western Digital WD360GD Raptors RAID 0 with 64K stripes on a Silicon Images 3112 Controller.....
Modified "thermally advantaged" Pacman mid tower case, Antec 550 W PSU, Intel 915 motherboard, P4 LGA775 64 bit 3.4 Ghz 800FSB 2Mb L2 cache processor, 2.0 Gb PQI DDR2 PC4300 533 Mhz RAM (4X512) in dual channel....

Using the "HD_Speed_Eng" program, I'm seeing read burst rates of 96 Mb/s.....ABSOLUTELY ASTONISHING throughput, especially since this array cost less than $250 brand new in February 2005!!!

Just after the New Year 2006, I'm going to build my new Intel dual core system with these 2 (or maybe more) Raptors...I'll keep you posted!