The WD1500's standing in the enterprise world remains less clear. 10K RPM 147 gigabyte Ultra320 SCSI drives sit squarely within the Raptor's price bracket Unencumbered with the concern of delivering blazing desktop performance and featuring time tested, mature command queuing implementations, these offerings from Seagate, Maxtor, Fujitsu, and Hitachi all significantly outdistance the WD1500 under even the lightest of concurrent loads. To compete in the market that WD covets so much, the Raptor must seek out some sort of advantage such as price or ease of integration with the budding SATA nearline field. As of this moment, the relative infancy of SAS's supporting infrastructure when contrasted with even SATA's nascent offerings may give the Raptor the nod in this regard. Such a lead, however, is temporary at best... SAS (and its compatibility with SATA drives) is the ordained successor to parallel SCSI and will inevitably level the playing field within the WD1500's product lifespan.

Thus, as of right now, the Raptor's primary advantages remain in the non-server field. Here the WD1500 once again demonstrates that efficient code coupled with a large buffer is the dominant factor when it comes to solving today's localized data access patterns. Manufacturers of 10K and 15K RPM SCSI drives simply do not take the time (and indeed, do not really care one way or another) to cater to the non-server market by aggressively coding and continuously refining firmware for single-user access paradigms.