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Building The Ultimate PC for FSX - Hard Drives

Hard Drives = 2 x Western Digital Raptor’s 150GB 10,000RPM in RAID 0

My Opinion

I started looking around for the perfect hard drive, I was surprised how little things had changed over the years. For me, there was one hard drive that stood above all others and I had to have it.

Choosing the 150GB Western Digital Raptors was an easy decision to make. For years, I have used with great success Western Digitals 74GB Raptors without the problems that I have found in Hard Disks of other types and brands. Both Seagate and Western Digital don’t seem to put the same emphasis on quality into their SATA2 7,200 RPM hard drives and it shows in their reliability.
Frustrating failures and degrading performance were once common aspects of early SATA2 hard drives.

With all products, you will have the odd lemon and the Western Digitals Raptor range of hard drives is not immune to manufacturing gremlins but in my experience they perform rock solid for longer periods of time. When you’re that unlucky owner of a faulty hard drive its frustrating when you spend so much time setting up your system only to have it fail after a few months. Loosing all your saved data and having to start the process over again. Sure the manufacturer will either give you a new hard drive or your money back. But it can take months for you to receive a replacement hard drive and I personally hate the suspicious look on a company salesman’s face when you ask for your money back. The items lost can be personal and irreplaceable such as digital photos or letters from loved ones. There is nothing most warranty department can do to replacing lost data. For those of us that have been around for a while we know the frustrations well and there is a good chance that we have all had at least one failure of a hard drive since we started using PC’s for every day use.

The Raptor group of hard drives has consistently been reliable for many years after purchase and the Western Digital Raptors come with a 5-year warranty. Given the nature of storage and the internet, this is becoming more and more important to the average PC user. Personal details are being stored on computers more than ever before and companies need reliability to ensure there wont be any negative impact on there customers through downtime. The financial impact of system failures in a hard drive can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Even humble user’s of this website would be devastated to lose their registration information of their favorite online products. Imagine losing your registration details to the up and coming FTX. Information of this nature can be hard to recover from a damaged disk and some companies in the interest of protecting their product will give you a hard time when you contact them for help (HL2 Steam comes to mind).

Below I will try to explain why I continue to chose Western Digital Raptors in a little detail and offer my advice on the best way to use them for performance-based application. This article and the group of articles as a whole are intended for the beginner to average user. If you would like detailed information, feel free to email me directly.