It is often prescribed that Western Digital's Raptor is the perfect desktop hard drive for persons looking for a performance enhanced ambitions. Ever since western digital introduced the Raptor, it is known as the 3.5" desktop hard drive that spins at 10,000 RPM, and has eaten up the market of other 3.5” serial hard drives in the desktop space.

WD1500ADFD Raptor was released by western digital in January 2006 and features two 75 GB platters, which adds up to 150 GB. The WD1500ADFD Raptor consists of a more advanced system of native command queuing (NCQ). Hence due to this technology the Raptor is capable to increase the performance of SATA hard disks under certain situations.

This allows the Raptor to internally optimize the order, which consists of read and write commands execution. This is a very good technology usage by Raptor as it reduces the amount of unnecessary drive head movement, resulting in increasing performance for multiple workloads, especially in server type applications.

The raptor is crowned as the undisputed champion in desktop hard drive arena, but at the same time it is the most expensive drive. The WD1500 Raptor uses a Serial ATA/150 interface, which is good enough. At the same time it is also noticed that more and more products run a 300 MB/s SATA interface, but still the Raptor is a stand out and no other drive outperforms it.

The access time for WD1500ADFD Raptor, 150 GB single drive including rotational latency is 8.0, whereas for 2 X 150 GB (RAID 0) is 8.1 which is impressive as compared as to other drives. The interface bandwidth time for WD1500ADFD Raptor, 150 GB single drive is 125.4 MB/s, whereas for 2 X 150 GB (RAID 0) is 194.5 MB/s.

The average read transfer rates and write transfer rates for WD1500ADFD Raptor, 150 GB single drive is 75 MB/s and 74.1 MB/s respectively and that for 2 X 150 GB (RAID 0) is 149.7 MB/s and 142.8 MB/s respectively.

The Windows XP startup performance and the Windows boot time for WD1500ADFD Raptor, 150 GB single drive is 11.3 MB/s and 21.3 seconds whereas for 2 X 150 GB (RAID 0) is 14.7 MB/s and 21.4 seconds respectively.

The WD Raptor holds its place as the fastest serial ATA desktop hard drive but at the same time it comes with a high price tag and covers a five year warranty.