Western Digital Raptor WD740GD-00FLC0

Western Digital Raptor WD740GD Available Capacities Model Number Capacity WD740GD 74 GB Lowest Real-Time Price (73 GB): Introduction It has been nearly two years since Western Digital introduced the Raptor WD740GD, the second version of the firm's ground-breaking 10,000 RPM SATA drive. As the months have segued into years, the WD740GD has aged gracefully. The drive remains near the top in all single-user performance tests and only recently has been challenged by new ATA offerings such as Hitachi's Deskstar 7K500 and WD's own 400 GB Caviar WD4000KD.

Recently, we requested four of WD's latest-revision Raptors to provide a reference comparison against which other enterprise-oriented SATA disks may be compared in Testbed4's expanded multi-drive array coverage. The first order of business was to put a single drive to the test operating off of the machine's standard SI3124-2 controller. As the results poured in, it became clear that significant performance differences exist between these drives, the "00FLC0" revision, and our former samples, the "00FLA1"s.

Four major versions of the product have made it into the channel: the original 00FLA0 (covered in SR's initial review), the 00FLA1 (featured in our look at Raptor RAID performance and subsequently reassessed under Testbed4), the 00FLA2 (not tested by SR), and 00FLC0, the revision featured in this writeup.

Readers have filled the SR forums agonizing over the purchase of the venerable Raptor versus one of the new 400+ GB SATA disks that combine performance with monstrous capacity. To assist in solving this dilemma (or to add fuel to the fire), we have decided to take one last look at a drive destined to be a classic.

The following performance tests contrast the Raptor with these drives: