Western Digital VelociRaptor

Many hard drive enthusiasts have been waiting for the next in the Western Digital Raptor series of storage. Today we have a quick look at the VelociRaptor. A 300GB hard drive that is sort of crazy, but aimed at being really cool.Hard drive enthusiasts are a curious bunch. You either know you are one or you know if you are not. While many of us are worried about how many gigabytes we can cram into a single bay, Western Digital has made a huge brand for itself over the last few years with the Raptor name. We have used WD Raptor drives as our primary system testing drives for years now here at HardOCP. We moved from 36GB to 74GB to 150GB hard drive sizes. Today WD kicks off its next-gen Raptor in the VelociRaptor.

To get you up to speed we have included a few pictures of our test drive along with Western Digital’s full VelociRaptor media deck. Here is a 3D overview that has some great mouse-overs as well that will give you the highlights in a more dramatic way. One look at the VelociRaptor will tell you that this ain’t your Momma’s 10,000 RPM hard drive.

Not only are they 35 percent faster than the previous generation WD Raptor drives, but they also beat out all other competitors in the field.

Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:

Killer Speed — Built on the performance of the WD Raptor, these 10,000

RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-
bending performance.

Rock-solid Reliability — WD VelociRaptor drives are designed and
manufactured to business-critical, enterprise-class standards to provide
enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. The design
results in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at
1.4 million hours MTBF.

IcePack Mounting Frame — The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are
enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in
heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed
in high-performance desktop chassis.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF(TM)) — Optimizes performance when
the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

SecurePark(TM) — Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during
spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording
head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term
reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

“It wasn’t the fastest drive in every test and was even beaten by 7,200-RPM drives on a handful of occasions, but the VelociRaptor’s combination of blazing-fast transfer rates and lightning-quick access times is a tough matchup for any Serial ATA drive” Geoff Gasior, The Tech Report

Our benchmark results speak for themselves and prove that Western Digital has done the right thing from an enthusiast standpoint. The new VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS will ship in May at retail prices of approximately $300, and it is the fastest and coolest 3.5″-like hard drive you can get for desktop PCs. WE say ‘3.5″-like’ because it is a 2.5″ hard drive that comes pre-installed in the IcePack frame, which provides efficient cooling and easy installation in standard 3.5″ drive bays. The VelociRaptor provides the quickest access time, the best transfer rates, excellent application results, amazingly low surface temperature and an acceptable noise level along with its unorthodox product name. Tomshardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914-14.html)

The Western Digital VelociRaptor was a blast to test since it’s not every day something this new and innovative comes across the test bench. The Western Digital VelociRaptor is hands down the fastest single hard drive we have ever tested and it is hard to believe that the firmware is still being improved.  It will be exciting to see how much more performance Western Digital will be able to get out of the VelociRaptor before it hits retail stores in May.  As it stands right now having a burst speed of over 250 MB/s and a sustained read speed pushing over 100 MB/s is enough to put a smile on our face. Just imagine running RAID 0 with a pair of these!  LEGITREVIEW (http://www.legitreviews.com/article/699/7/)