If PC enthusiasts had a hall of fame for hardware, Western Digital's Raptor hard drive would be a shoo-in. Storage-related products are usually a little short on sex appeal, but the Raptor has become an icon—a testament to what it means to be an enthusiast.

Like many enthusiast legends, the Raptor started with enterprise-class hardware designed for corporate server rooms. Western Digital, a plucky desktop drive maker with no background in SCSI hardware that dominated the enterprise scene at the time, came to bat with the world's first 10K-RPM Serial ATA hard drive. The original Raptor didn't usurp the enterprise crown from well-established SCSI players, but its performance blew away every other Serial ATA hard drive on the market. What's more, the Raptor plugged into standard desktop motherboards, delivering near-SCSI performance without the need for expensive expansion cards.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583

Very impressive! Best performance, good acoustics, and in a smaller form factor no less...

the smaller form factor is partly cause of the higher performance
it's not really laptop 2.5" material due to thickness, but as uberfast system drive it will serve well if you have too much money.

if you look at the real world tests, the drive is at the top but other drives, 7200rpm are able to match it, and better it.

only in the synthetic benchmarks and pure file copy/paste tests does the drive stand apart; real world tests show less gain to be had.

overall, for the price, I would rather have more space, than few % better copy times, but to each his own

7200RPM drives shouldn't be able to better it though, not when it offers higher sustained read/writes at the lowest access times. Probably because the firmware is not complete yet: http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=432

let's just hope it's a firmware issue

i have a 36.7gig raptor (old S.O.B) and it get fragmented SOOOO easy and isn't noticably faster than my 250gb caviar SATA... anyone want my raptor?