Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM

[Siryne]

Anyone useing this drive? Any info? Is it reccomended, and is it noticibly faster than 7200 Seagate drives. Would it make a LARGE improvement in my trackcount and/or plug in usage?

Dual G5 1.8
2GB RAM
DP 4.5
TC Powercore Element
MOTU 896HD
OS 10.3.5

Thanks
Peace

[Spiderfinger]

I have 2 Raptors in a G5 dual 2.5 w/8 gig of ram. One is my boot drive and the other is for sample streaming. The performance difference is huge. I can stream over 300 simultaneous Mach 5 voices using the Raptor, where I couldn't come anywhere near that with the stock Seagate 7200 RPM SATA or using my Firewire 800 drives. Overall system feel is noticeably faster with Raptor as boot drive.

Highly recommended.

[kmixx]

How are the drives, when it comes to noise?

[inukshuk]

I don't know how quite the raptors are but I have the WD Caviars in mine and the are good and quite, but I am definitely going to get the raptors in my next computor.
I'd love to put them in my present computer, but can't because my present system is set-up for ATA drives, unless someone can help me with this.

[wolfetho]

I was also thinking about putting the Raptor in my G4 dual 1.25 ghz. machine. From what I've heard you can use the SATA drives in your G4 with a SATA controller (PCI card). there's a company named FilmTek , and SIIG that make a controller card for about $70.00.

I'm also really curious if the Raptor SATA would improve the performance much on my G4 with regard to track counts and streaming large piano samples, etc.

Tom