page_title: Western Digital Raptor
section_title: EL74
hierarchical_section_title: Western Digital Raptor / Models / EL74
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Dieses Bild zeigt eine SATA-Festplatte (Western Digital WD740 - 10.000 U/Min - 74 GB).
context_page_description: The Western Digital Raptor were a series of high performance hard disk drives produced by Western Digital first marketed in 2003. The drive occupies a niche in the enthusiast, workstation and small-server market. Traditionally, the majority of servers used hard drives featuring a SCSI interface because of their advantages in both performance and reliability over consumer-level ATA drives.
  Although pitched as an “enterprise-class drive”, it won favor with the PC gaming and enthusiast community because the drive was capable of speeds usually found only on more expensive SCSI drives. Adopting the SATA interface meant that it could be used easily on all modern motherboards with no separate host adapter card. Also, integration was made easier still by the inclusion of a standard 4-pin Molex power connector in addition to the standard SATA power port.
  Despite having been in production since early 2003, there was no direct competition in the same market for many years.
  In 2006, Western Digital acknowledged the primary consumer of its Raptor brand drives by releasing a revision of its 150 GB drive.
context_section_description: The second generation Raptor was introduced in early 2004, featuring two platters for 74 GB of storage space. Unlike its predecessor, the WD740GD didn't use ball bearings to support the spinning disks, but rather used fluid dynamic bearings. These allowed the new Raptor to operate at a noise level comparable to the quieter 7,200 rpm drives.
  Another advantage the WD740GD had over its predecessor was Tagged Command Queuing, a feature that had previously been available only in SCSI drives. Command queuing resulted in a notable increase in the WD740GD's multi-user performance—a key discipline where its predecessor failed compared to SCSI drives. However, enabling command queuing on the WD740GD resulted in a performance decrease in single-user scenarios. It is worth noting that as of 2005, only a few SATA controllers could fully support command queuing. This drive became immensely popular in high-end gaming systems because of these features.
  In 2006 Western Digital revised the WD740GD specification and released the WD740ADFD, ostensibly the same drive but with 16 MB of on-board cache, and a larger single platter (one 75 GB platter vs two 37 GB platters).  Support for TCQ (rarely supported on SATA RAID controllers) was dropped in favor of NCQ, and at the same time replacing the SATA-to-PATA bridge controller chip with a native SATA controller. Unfortunately one of the major enhancements of WD740ADFD, the NCQ, is implemented so badly in the WD740ADFD-00NLR1 that it has been added to the Linux libata drive blacklist. The WD740GD did not apply because it uses TCQ and not NCQ. In order to deal with it, NCQ is disabled Link to the NCQ-Bug in the Kernel Bug Tracker. In TCQ capable controllers, the WD740GD is possibly faster than its successor as some of the WD740ADFDs' gains are lost. The WD740ADFD has also caused problems in some motherboards and their manufacturers had to release BIOS updates.
caption: Western Digital WD740
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