Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB Hard Drive Review

[Apoptosis]

Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB Hard Drive Review

It wasn't long ago that a 10,000 RPM spinning VelociRaptor drive was the pinnacle of computer storage performance and enthusiasts flocked to them. Now that the SSD has proliferated, many have forgotten about these once coveted drives. Western Digital as increased the capacity to 1TB and upped the performance 25%. How will it compete with the likes of hybrid drives and the older VelociRaptor drives? Read on to see.

Users can expect a 25% increase (according to WD) in performance and we saw sequential read/write scores that exceeded the rated specifications of 200MB/s. This is supported by a large 64MB cache to help buffer data. Overall, for a spinning platter drive, performance was very good and it's a bit amazing that they've been able to get so much capacity in a drive with the platters rotating at 10,000 RPM. With such speeds, you'd expect the drive to be noisy but even on our open test bed, the noise was better than our aging 300GB model and is listed at 30 dBA idle and 37 dBA in performance seek mode.

Article Title: Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB Hard Drive Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1907/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $319.99 SRP

[Major_A]

For that price you're better off getting a Momentus XT or a SSD cache drive and mechanical HDD. This product may have made more sense before the floods. Right now it's a tough sell to anyone.

[lordvic]

" It's 15mm in height and is not designed to be removed from it's base so don't get any ideas of yanking it out to drop in your notebook PC. We know how you think! "

...Damn!

Performance-wise, I have to say, that's quite good for a mechanical drive; it performs just under the hybrid drives which is interested.

I must agree with Major_A though, ~$300 for 1.5TB seems a bit expensive.

By the way, is it possible to do one or two quick tests with this Velociraptor vs the more recent SATA3 Western Digitial Caviar Black drives? Just for comparision sakes versus one of the leading 7200RPM HDDs.