Quiet, big, and fast in RAID 0.

I'm building a new system and wanted to make it as fast as I could out of the gate, so I got a WD1500ADFD 10,000-rpm SATA 150 drive because I wanted to see how the extremely low seek-times affected the feeling of speed. It was fast, no doubt, even though the SATA 150 interface is half the max data rate of SATA 300. But it was loud. That speed required a powerful armature, which sounded like a hammer pounding on the inside of my computer.

The local Fry's Electronics advertised the WD5000AAKS at $89 after an immediate discount (normal price $139, if I recall correctly). I'd read in technical discussions online that SATA 300 disks, if used in a RAID 0 configuration (two disks striped with no error correction, effectively working in parallel) would be apparently as fast as the low-latency SATA 150 disks. My new motherboard supports RAID, as does Windows Vista, so I decided it was right to at least try it. It didn't hurt that I got the two new disks for the same price as the old one.

I installed them this morning, and I'm impressed with the speed. I can't say I detect a significant difference in how it feels. But the real winner is the sound. Instead of the clattering and thrashing and thumping I had with the WD1500ADFD, the WD5000AAKS make a light, muffled ticking noise. It's significant, as the new case and CPU fans are also silent, so the only noise that ever comes from the machine is drive seeking. Neither of these HD models makes any full-speed platter noise, but the difference in the armature noise more than makes up for any difference I might eventually notice in the seek times. The RAID parallelization may be making them effectively equal in performance to the 1500's. I'm sure I'll be getting far more streaming performance, though. Maybe up to 4X (2x3 gbps vs. 1x1.5 gbps).

Oh, and for the same money, I get over 6X the storage space. Now I just need to find a way to fill up a terabyte...