Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: About 1msec drop in real access times from the previous raptors. Low power consumption. Best performing drive that isn't SAS.

Cons: SATA connector on the drive is shallow thus making it a bit flimsy. You won't be able to use SATA cables that have clips on the connectors. Quite the premium for top performance at a dollar per gigabyte.

Overall Review: This drive has 279GB capacity formatted. HD tach rates this drive at 107MB/sec avg. read, 260+MB/sec burst, 7.1msec avg random access. Compared to one of the leading 7,200RPM drives (WD6400AAKS) with 94MB/sec read, 240MB/sec burst, 12.7msec access. The difference in access times can be noticed when booting into windows, installing programs and updates, opening programs, loading certain games. If you're looking for the best performing desktop drive that isn't SAS, this is it. If storage capacity is more your concern then I recommend the WD6400AAKS as it has great performance and top value per GB. Drives tested on a GA-P35C-DS3R w/ an E6550 @ 3.33Ghz and 2GB RAM.

Pros: Fast

Cons: I have had the same experience as others like the one below. I have an Intel's ICH9R controller and like a had full of other the second drive will show errors in the Intel RAID management software. I also get some random crashes but I can get RAID errors every time if I try to copy a large amount of data, 100GB or so and I’ll get RAID errors and Check Disc always seems to find something. But I can copy all I want from the other drives in the system. I don’t know who is to blame but I’ve tried 4 different motherboards DFI and Gigabyte, RAM, cables power supply but still unstable and WD And Intel don’t seem to care.

Overall Review: I originally processed my RMA thinking my 2nd drive was faulty, despite the fact that WD's hard drive tool reported it as being fine. After further research, it appears that if you're using it in a RAID array, the last drive of the RAID will eventually fall out of the array. So if you have a 2 drive RAID 0 setup, the 2nd drive will always be the one that shows up as having an error. From what I've read on different forums, it looks like it affects both Nvidia chipsets and Intel's ICH9R/10R, which makes me believe this is a hard drive and not a chipset issue.

It sounds to me like it could possibly be a TLER issue, which basically is set to enabled or disabled from the factory, which is what makes a RAID hard drive different from a single drive. I haven't tried the TLER fix yet, but WD needs to update the firmware or fix their hardware so RAID owners don't keep returning their hard drives if it can easily be resolved by a simple firmware fix.