WD Raptor 36GB goes bang after 3 years

Inquitus

Not really that fussed, was great while it worked, bit pissed it was still my boot drive as I had to re-install everything etc.

Would you reckon 3 years is an acceptable lifespan for a HD. Obviously the higher speed of this particular drive is likely to contribute in it's early demise.

It is however the first HD to die on me, the rest lived until thrown out.

I have gone for a nice Sata II 16MB cache 7200rpm drive as the replacement which is actually quicker than then old Raptor that died, and most likely less likely to expire than if I had chose the new large Raptor in it's place.

Inqui

PS There used to be huge performance benefits from Raptor's over the slower competition, but it seems Sata II, 16MB caches etc have eaten away the advantage the 10,000rpm drives used to have. What would you choose? A new raptor will beat these drives narrowly but cost more and hold less.

L31mr0d

Agreed, my next build will feature 2 Higher capacity SATA2 drives in a RAID 0, rather than any raptors (unless I can them really cheap, then i'd be able to justify them) The speed increase is so negligible that apart from synthethic benchmarks I haven't noticed, much, if any difference between my current raptor raid and my previous SATA2 RAID.

Also, I don't know about others, but avoid the 7200.10 drives like the plague. They are slower than the raptors but 10 times as noisy. I bought 2 a month ago and the seek noise is not only loud but extremely frequent. Just moving a text file from the desktop to a folder causes a loud seek noise, and they DON'T offer any AAM support for turning the seek noise down. Stick with the 7200.2 SATA2 drives for the best performance to noise balance.

awhir

the seagate 7200.10 drives come in 2 flavours 1 has noise motor other(most) are very silent and very fast .you can tell which motor by the die colour.