Thread: Veloci Raptor Hard Drive

WESTERN DIGITAL picked a very appropriate name for its new 10,000-rpm (rotations per minute) hard drive. Dubbed the VeiociRaptor, this drive screamed through the PC World Test Center's performance tests, handily besting our tested field of hard drives to become our top overall performer. Speed is clearly the drive's raison d'etre.

Unlike many hard drives we review, which alternate between crests and troughs of strength and weakness in our tests, the VeiociRaptor demonstrated a sustained level of power across the PC World Test Center's entire suite of hard-drive tests. In one of its most impressive feats, the VelociRaptor wrote 3.06GB of files and folders in a speedy 89 sec¬onds, surpassing the next¬fastest drive in our chart, the Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB, by 32 seconds-a 26 percent improvement.

The VelociRaptor is an in¬teresting drive for several reasons that go beyond its performance numbers, how¬ever: The latest in Western Digital's family of Raptor 10,000-rpm drives, the 300GB VelociRaptor doubles the capacity of the company's previous-generation 150GB Raptor drive. The company sees garners and PC enthusi¬asts as the drive's pri¬mary audience, though the VeiociRaptor is designed to handle enterprise-class applica¬tions, too.



The drive carries a rating of 1. 2 million hours as its mean time between fail¬ures. That rating puts it on a par with other enter¬prise-grade drive I had no trouble installing the drive-though you'll cer¬tainly notice, as soon as you take it out of the box, that the VelociRaptor is no ordi¬nary hard drive. With the VelociRaptor, Western Digital introduces an innovative ap¬proach to achieving a high¬performance desktop hard drive. The company squeezed its 10,000-rpm drive into a 2.5-inch chassis; traditional¬ly, desktop hard drives¬whether 7200 rpm or 10,000 rpm-use a 3.5-inch chassis. (Though the drive itself mea¬sures just 2.5 inches, the VelociRaptor is designed to fit in a 3.5-inch drive bay.)

Western Digital says that it chose the 2.5-inch form for two reasons. First, a smaller drive is better mechanically: The disk undergoes flutter at its outer edges when it spins at the higher rotations per minute, and a 2.5-inch drive produces less of this flutter than a 3.5-inch one does. Second, advances in disk platter design made it possible for Western Digital to give the VeiociRaptor a competitive capacity¬double the capacity of the previous (150GB) Raptor drive despite its smaller surface area.

Heat generation remains a concern with hard drives, especially when the drive spins as rapidly as it does on a 10,000-rpm model. To miti¬gate heat issues, Western Digital mounts the 2.5-inch VelociRaptor drive on a heat sink sled dubbed the IcePack. The IcePack helps the VeiociRaptor to run about 5 Fahrenheit degrees cooler than the previous¬generation Raptor did, West¬ern Digital says. The sled doubles as the VeiociRap¬tor's mounting adapter for a 3.5-inch drive bay.