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.