The new Western Digital Raptor X hard drive takes all the technology that made the Raptor 74 GB model so impressive, and improved upon it in many ways. The Raptor X still maintains the ultra-fast 10,000 RPM spin rate that is responsible for most of the high performance numbers that the Raptor’s provide over the rest of the hard drive world that is still running at 7200 RPM. The cache on the new Raptor X has been increased from 8 MB to 16 MB, matching the highest cache size available in the consumer level hard drives today including Western Digital's own SE16 line. The drive still only uses two total platters, giving the Raptor X a density of 75 GB/per platter. This high density level allows the drive to read even more data off the 10,000 RPM disk than the Raptor 74 GB did with a 36 GB/platter density level. In general, the closer together the data is, the faster it can be read as long as stability and other issues don’t become a problem. The transfer specification on the Raptor X is still using the 150 MB/s rate, which is a bit of a disappointment since we have seen SATA 300 MB/s become more common in high-end drives these days. In all reality, the change in specs won’t really have a big performance benefit to the end user, having support for the latest technology is always key when addressing a PC enthusiast market.