Western Digital Raptor vs. Maxtor Maxline III

We’re outfitting a new server here in the office, and it appears the Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive w/8MB Buffer ($165 ZipZoomFly) is the fastest Serial ATA drive out there. It also has a five-year warranty and 1.2 million hours MTBF so it appears Western Digital is confident the high speed won’t be at the expense of reliability. We went with this drive since we’ll be running a RAID 0+1 and the 74GB x 2 will be giving us more than enough capacity. If you need a lot more capacity, the Maxtor Maxline III 7L300S0 300GB Serial ATA 7200RPM Hard Drive w/16MB Buffer ($129 ZipZoomFly) looks like a good solution. Put 4 of those in a RAID 0+1 and you’ll have large capacity, high speed and redundancy.