Conclusions
The WD740GD is by far the fastest Serial ATA hard drive available, but performance doesn't come cheap. With a street price of $230, the latest Raptor costs twice as much as its 37GB predecessor, and much more than Maxtor and Seagate's Serial ATA offerings. Still, the Raptor WD740GD's price tag is actually quite reasonable when compared with 10K-RPM SCSI gear, so it's hard to call the this drive overpriced. Also, remember, the Raptor packs a five-year warranty.

If you're looking for the fastest performance for single-user applications, it doesn't get much better than the WD740GD. The original Raptor was already an impressive performer, and its successor's improved performance and larger capacity take the goodness to the next level.

Unfortunately, as great as the WD740GD is in single-user applications, the drive doesn't scale nearly as well as 10K RPM SCSI disks under multi-user loads. The WD740GD's tagged command queuing support should help boost multi-user performance, but this capability won't be tapped until controller cards arrive with TCQ support. 

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