The only obvious feature missing here is a Serial ATA-II/300 interface, which was left off due to quality concerns with new SATA-II/300 components. Serial ATA-150 is a more stable choice at this point, and this fact alone should not affect performance in any way. However, it does make the drive look antiquated to someone who is not familiar with these facts, as many will want a "fast" Serial ATA-II/300 hard drive to pair with their new SATA-II/300 compliant motherboard, ignoring the fact that this Serial ATA-150 disk will be faster than any Serial ATA-II/300 disk you can possibly buy. There are rumors picking up that WD will introduce a "gaming" version of this drive with a Serial ATA-II/300 interface - although they have not confirmed such a product yet.

In terms of raw performance, the Raptor 150 is unbeatable at this point. Most new Serial ATA-II/300 class 7,200 RPM hard drives can push around 50-55 MB/s sustained transfer rates, whereas the Raptor 74 GB could push around 65 MB/s. The Raptor 150 GB one ups them all, maxing out at around 77 MB/s for a single drive, and improvement of roughly 18% over their previous generation product. Write speeds are improved as well, as our previous page of benchmarks showed. Take a few of these drives in RAID-0, and you have some heavy duty enterprise class storage. With four disks in RAID-0 we were able to push over 300 MB/s of sustained data read speed. Simply an amazing amount of storage power at one's fingertips.

However, it's not all roses at this point. The Raptor 150 GB has slightly higher random access times, although the Raptor 150 is still far quicker compared to every 7,200 RPM disks. In addition, the Raptor 150 GB does run a bit louder and a bit hotter compared to its predecessors. However, neither of these aspects really sways our opinion on the drive too much, as the changes are negligible for most environments.