A while back, when I reviewed Seagate’s terabyte hard drive, I mentioned that there were essentially two types of high-end consumer hard drives: the fast, low-capacity drives, and the slow, high-capacity drives. But both of the major hard drive manufacturers, Seagate and Western Digital, are closing that gap. We saw that with the Barracuda, although it provides industry-leading capacity, it still manages to be one of the fastest 7,200 RPM hard drives on the market. With Western Digital’s new VelociRaptor drive, they’re coming in from the other side.
The Velociraptor is the successor to WD’s Raptor hard drive, which was a high-speed 10,000 RPM drive with available capacities from 36GB, the epitome of my “fast drives have low capacity” note, to 150GB, which was just barely scratching the surface of practical everyday desktop use. This new drive claims to be thirty-five percent faster than the original Raptor, which was leading the industry to begin with. With the Velociraptor, they’ve pushed the capacity up to 300GB, while still improving performance and efficiency. For example, most high-speed consumer hard drives (10,000 RPM and up) recommend external cooling to keep the drive from overheating – and it makes sense. The drive is spinning faster than the standard speed for drives. Western Digital has overcome this problem by reducing the form factor of the Velociraptor to 2.5” and mounting the drive to a 3.5” adapter. That way, it still fits in the same hard drive bays as a normal desktop hard drive, but the adapter, or “Ice Pack”, as they call it, acts as a very effective heatsink. Another big advantage of the smaller form factor is that seek times are improved, because there is less actual surface area on the disks.
As far as actual usage is concerned, because the drive no longer requires special treatment like I mentioned that many high-speed drives do, installation and usage is just like any other drive. The only difference is the placement of the SATA and power connections on the drive, because they only have 2.5 inches to work with. This didn’t affect my installation and use, but if you were planning on using this drive with a hot-swappable SATA enclosure, it won’t fit. That’s not as big a deal as you’d think, because using an external USB or firewire interface for this drive would severely throttle the performance, and shouldn’t be considered an option.
My first performance test was to install Windows Vista Ultimate on both my Western Digital Caviar 250GB and this Velociraptor 300GB. Interestingly, I noticed very little performance difference, leading me to believe that I have a performance bottleneck before the hard drive. Lots of PC enthusiasts forget to consider hard drive performance when building a PC. They see capacity and that’s usually it. Unfortunately in high-performance systems, the hard drive can become the bottleneck on your speed. A fast hard drive can also make your games (and pretty much everything else) load faster. Next, I tried Windows XP. This is where the drive really shined for me. I instantly noticed a huge performance increase when using the new drive – the system started faster, was much more responsive, and all of my windows and programs loaded faster.
The Velociraptor also has a feature that WD calls SecurePark, which “parks” the recording heads off of the discs during spin-up, shut down, and when the drive is off. This allows you to shut down your system and load it up in your car for your next LAN party without worrying about your platters getting scratched and ruining your drive, or worse yet, losing your data. Speaking of losing data, the drive comes with a five year warranty – although with 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive. The Velociraptor is also (at the time of this writing) the world’s fastest SATA hard drive. Pretty impressive for a drive that sells for $300, and will only drop with time.
