160GB Wd Raptor Sata 10000 Rpm Ncq HDD

I've had good experiance with the Raptor previously. Fast and reliable, or at least the one I had before which was a 36gb version. I bought two of these 160gb 10k rpm Raptors at the same time. One of them just died today after two years of service. I got the click of death as I tried to start up the machine. These things do run hot to the touch, and I have hard drive fans directly in front of all my HDs mounted on the case. I even have rubber cushioned mounts. I took care of these Raptors, but one still died.

There isn't a faster, more reliable drive available. I've been running one for years 24x7. No problems at all plus lightning speed.

Before buying any WD Raptor high performance hard drives for use in a Mac G5... search the WD website until you find the tech support article that says some are not compatible. I thought we were all past this sort of stupid problem, but apparently not. WD apparently held back on publicly admitting this for way too long.

The Raptor is "enterprise class" and marketed as being built for heavy usage. And it does SEEM to work ok in a Mac dual G5 tower. But under heavy usage it locks up the OS really badly. (Like every other week, but sometimes goes 80 days). This cost us untold grief & thousands of dollars before figuring it out 13 months later. Adding a PCI SATA card fixed the problem. WD blames Apple, but Apple says they are at SATA spec. Whatever, it was a horrible combo until we added the basic (bootable) Sonnet pci sata card to drive the WD Raptor drives. Do your homework & beware.