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- Date:
- Monday , April 21, 2008
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Western Digital VelociRaptor Showcase
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.
VelociRaptor
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.
Conclusion
I will not sit here and tell you that us folks here at HardOCP are a bunch of hard drive experts, because we are not. I can sit around and run IOmeter and HDTach with the best of them though. Playing around this weekend with the VelociRaptor showed that the damn thing was faster than any other hard drive we had in-house, even our new 1TB WD hard drives, so while data density is a huge factor, it is not the only one when it comes to read and write speeds. I do know that I personally moved to using nothing but Western Digital hard drives after the whole IBM fiasco years ago and have not looked back.
You cannot buy the one shown here with the clear cover, at least not yet, but it will give you a bird’s eye view of the internals. The bottom unit is our engineering sample. When we get some retail drives in we will do some temperature testing on them and give you our opinions about the thermals.
Obviously, the selling point with the VelociRaptor is going to be the “coolness” factor, both in terms of actual heat and having something different than the next guy. Western Digital’s VelociRaptor cooling works well and puts it in a package that that can’t easily be forgotten. Now to just be one of those guys that can figure out how to show it off well.
Check out PCPer and LegitReviews for more coverage.
Discussion
Join our HardForum discussion about the VelociRaptor already very much in progress.