Western Digital's VelociRaptor HDD

Named after a dinosaur species which was quick and vicious, this HDD is also

built for high speed. It comes with 10,000 rpm spindle speed, SATA 3 GB/s

interface and 16 MB cache to give high performance. VelociRaptor has 300 GB

storage space with a form factor of 2.5” which means more capacity per disk

drive when compared to earlier WD Raptor series.

VelociRaptor HDD comes with an IcePack mounting frame with a heat sink. This

IcePack has a size of 3.5” changing the disk's actual form factor and on top of

it if one separates actual drive from IcePack, the warranty is lost. Though

IcePack improves performance of this disk, at the same time it also reduces its

usability as it cannot be attached to drive enclosure or NAS.

Western Digital has introduced two more versions of the same disk for

increasing its usability: one without heat sink and other with plane back, but

none of these versions are for notebooks; usability is confined to

high-performance workstations and low-end servers. To increase reliability of

this product, recording heads are parked off the disk surface during spin up,

spin down, and when the drive is off. This feature is named SecurePark.

For optimization of performance in vibration prone environments this HDD is

packed with RAFF (Rotatory Acceleration Feed Forward) technology. All in all

amount of money spent per GB of storage is high but this price brings enhanced

performance with it.

We tested this drive on a machine with Intel Quad Core processor and 2 GB

RAM. In Business Disk Winmark it gave a throughput of 14.5 MBps with 60% CPU

usage that is almost equal to WD RE2 (reviewed in PCQ Apr '08).

In high-end disk Winmark, it gave a throughput of 70.5 MBps with 59% CPU

usage that is very high as compared to the previously reviewed HDDs.

Finally, we carried out tests to calculate access time and temperature to

check the effect of IcePack. We found that access time was 7.5 ms and

temperature was 36 degree Celsius, which is 6 degrees less than that achieved by

Segate's Barracuda.

So the heat sink is obviously an advantage here, which helps keep the drive

cool.

Bottomline: If performance is critical for your desktop workstation or

low-end server, then surely go for this HDD.