Hard drive shows off its head

WE RECIEVED a unit from Western Digital in a rather, for a disk drive - unusual packaging. Inside an anti-static bag there is another, cloth bag, which protects the first acrylic cover in the history of hard drives. Our first INQpression is that we're impressed.

Sadly, hard disk manufacturers constructed a hard drive with a window when NCQ tech took off, so the head isn't flying over the head as it would be the case of disk drives only couple of years ago.

You can be pretty sure the extender arm with the head won't get tennis elbow anytime soon. The head simply floats over the platter. No sporadic movements... unless you start loading the drive to its full, 139.74GB formatted capacity.

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Performance wise, this one is a monster. Don't be tricked by all those reviews that put the classic, 7200 rpm drives at about 80-90% of performance when compared to the 10K rpm monster.

While oft-used (and abused) benchmarks put great importance on the burst speed and read speed, the real truth lies within one often-forgotten specification: seek time. Lowering access and seek times are the main goal of every HDD engineer. And this baby has a real-world, HDtach-measured access time of 8.0ms, aka double its declared 4.0ms seeks. 7200rpm drives often offer declared speeds of either 8.0ms or 12ms, but, in the real world, we're talking about 13-16ms, which is double than this Raptor offers.

To give you a bit of insight about how this drive performs, we'll give you an insight to our "INQture" hard-disk test. We place 50GB of small compressed documents (.RAR format, using maximum compression) containing images in JPEG format. Using the cataloguing application named WhereIsIt? in its latest iteration (v3.72), we launched an indexing and low-quality thumbnail part, which is a rather standard thing to do if you have a photo library of several thousand of images. In our INQture test, 27.000 of them.

The test should also be a strain for the system memory and the processor, but the difference between a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 250GB and the Raptor with an identical amount of cache is just astounding.

Both Raptor X and Barracuda rely on SATA-II 3Gb/s interface, supporting NCQ technology - with the "only" paper spec difference being the rotation speed of the platters. However, Raptor X will index the files in 18 minutes and 28 seconds, while Maxtor will take 28 minutes and 50 seconds, which is a killing 10 minutes and 22 seconds difference. 36%, if you prefer.

We received additional Raptor X only an hour ago, so we'll retest the Raptors in RAID 0 array.

Bear in mind that these beasts aren't cheap. A single drive will set you back for around 330 euros. And, if you decide that you don't need a wee window, then you need to spend only 280 euros. We'll post a fuller review, with both single drive and RAID scores over th weekend. ?