Nowadays we get a lot of questions about what hard drive to go for, what the best is. Well for your pleasure we thought we would find out. Currently the Western Digital Raptor hard drives are very highly rated, so what is it about the Raptors that still makes them so special? That’s what we intend to find out in this article. But before any testing goes on, let’s have a look at the Raptor.

The latest production from WD - Raptor X, so you can admire the insides.

It definitelly looks good, but let’s check out its specifications. The first thing about the Raptor is that it spins at a staggering 10,000 RPMs, where as most other hard drives will do 7,200 RPMs or less. That is server hard drive speeds. This fast spinning speed of the raptor enables it to have a nice seek time of 4.5 ms. The latest Raptors also has an 16Mb buffer size, which is becoming a standard today. Now we know a bit about the Raptor, lets put it to the test. First off, let look at the transfer speed.