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On my Linux system, I moved /tmp & /home (& swap) to this drive. User speed (login, open terminal window, browser, etc. etc.) more than doubled, even though my computer already had max RAM (2GB) and is clocked faster than 2.5MHz. The speedup was worth the money - reusing one of these old drives was a very positive experience. (By current standards the old drives are "small" ...but they're actually plenty big for all of my needs; they're big enough I can misplace/lose files just fine:-) I was worried about heat, but according to the internal temperature readings from `smartctl`, this new 10000RPM drive actually runs significantly cooler (!) than the old pre-existing 7200RPM drive.
I've found Western Digital HD's to be highly reliable and I've used 1,000's, thousands, of HD's for projects. I'm using this drive in a quality Rocket Fish external enclosure for off system critical data back up and portability. Although used and older, SMART and diagnostics show a HD in perfect shape. Low S&H clinched the deal. Given the size, weight and G tolerance of these HD's, they ship nicely USPS 1st Class in a bubble pack at a low cost.
Using one 74GB Raptor as my C system drive and a second for my Data drive gives me a smooth 148 GB's of 10,000 RPM stability and reliability. Heavy drives; sturdy and solid. Essentially I just wanted to see if these drives really make much of a difference in performance. The answer is a noticible and resounding, YES! Just for fun I bought four 74 GB Raptor drives; not for a raid array either. I cloned my 320 GB 7200 RPM Barracuda system drive onto two of the four, sepeately. This gives me a spare C system drive if and when this one crashes one day and also a spare Data drive to go along with it or possibly a third C drive; undecided right now. I'm tired of having to do a full system load when a drive packs it in without warning! Now its a simple swap out and carry on; worth a few extra bucks to me to have a spare system drive just waiting to be swapped out! Only thing to do is copy back what/if anything I want on the new system drive from my external backup drive. Definatly adds performance to my machine.Read full review
The drive at 10,000 rpm's is somewhat faster than a 7,200. It is slightly noisier than a regular drive, but not bad. Seems very stable, never had a western digital drive fail on me. Did not need much space for OS and programs only. I use a seperate large drive for videos and mp3's. Installed the OS fast. Would recomend for multi drive setups such as mine. Great price for the speed.
I put a few low cost upgrades into my Pentium 4 Gamer in order to eek out a few more years of service from this old beast. More memory and a faster processor made it run smoother but it didn’t feel faster until I installed a Western Digital Raptor WD740GD. I’m using the 74GB Raptor for my C: drive running Windows XP with a 250GB WD drive for data and I couldn’t be happier.
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