Winbench

The WD740GD leads the way in Winbench 99's Diskmark tests and offers a healthy performance boost over the WD360GD.

The WD740GD also leads the single-drive pack in Winbench's transfer rate tests, though the Raptor falls to our two-drive RAID 0 array at the beginning of the disk. This time around, the WD740GD is much faster than the original Raptor.

It doesn't quite manage a win in Winbench's access time test, bit the WD740GD is only 0.1 milliseconds slower than Maxtor's Atlas IV. More importantly, Western Digital has improved the new Raptor's access times over its predecessor.