Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Noticeably speeds up your system. I came within seconds of returning it because it emitted a loud coffee percolating noise when booting or generally active. I happened to place it on my rug for a final boot an suddenly it became much more quiet My metal drive cage was amplifying the drive noise greatly. I then ordered from here a $25 Zalmon hard drive cooler with rubber posts that I attached to the bottom of my tower case where there was space and a spare fan to cool it. The fan cools the drive by 10 degrees so I did no bother to attach the heat sink which only lowers the temperature 2-3 degrees. This lowered the noise a great deal. I then further loosened the screws to the rubber posts which made the drive quite a bit quieter than my other somewhat older fluid dynamic bearing drives. If you have to put it in a 5 inch slot instead of the bottom of the case Zalmon makes a great quiet cooler for around $27 with a fan which would cool it much better than a fan-less one. (check color)

Cons: If you have a media oriented PC you might be better off with a slightly quieter Sata 500 gig server oriented drive. A 200 gig partition on the outside of the drive would only be about 15% slower than the Raptor and you would gain space and less noise. (See Storage Review)

Overall Review: If you Google Raid Performance and do a bit of surfing you will find that raid 0 is a waste of time for desktop machines for almost all applications. It just adds needless complexity and unreliability. Thus buying 2 smaller noiser Raptors is pointless. Using raid on a desktop for mirroring is also not useful. You are much better off using an extra drive to store Acronis backup images of the system drive and data backups of your data partition. Most system problems relate to software problems which mirroring does not address.

Pros: Newegg of course shipped quickly. This drive runs ultra fast! Repair installed Windows in 15 minutes!

Cons: Guess I must have bad luck cause mine failed S.M.A.R.T test right after Windows instalation!
A8N-Sli Deluxe reported that it would fail soon. Just to be sure I downloaded WD bootable diag program and needless to say got the same results, it didn;t even give me chance to check for errors :( RMA allready sent.

Overall Review: I don't care about noise so much but heat thats a different story. This drive was very hot evey out of my case with in an airconditioned room when my replacment comes back I'm buyin a HD cooler for this thing.