Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor SATA 10,000 RPM 16 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive WD3000HLFS

5 comments

1. 

   L. Lu on December 12, 2009 at 9:04 pm

   I have had this drive for 2 weeks, used it for testing purposes in a rig for a friend and this drive performs above the average 7200rpm or older 10k Raptors. They sure are better than the 7200 rpm stuff out there. Seek times are marginally faster than the old raptor while capacity is acceptable for the current generation of OS requirements.

   Price per GB is about ~$1. If you search the market you will find that 15000 rpm SAS drives are much faster than this dinasour in terms of rotational speed, latency and seek times. The sequential read of 15k drives is about the same as 10k but SAS drives are much more efficient and a step above this. What matters in a drive is the small size random writes and the SAS trounce the raptor in every sense.

   Current generation of motherboards have marvell SAS controllers which is enough and getting a SAS drive is a better route than the Raptor. There isn’t anything better than 15k drives in the mechanical drives realm. If you are buying this is because you are enthusiast and since the SAS drives cost less than the raptor makes this product overpriced slow and bad choice.
   

2. 

   Terry L. Shortridge on December 12, 2009 at 9:53 pm

   I can not comment much on this product because I was sent a Seagate Cheetah instead, but Amazon was nice enough to take it back and is sending the right order. I have purchased this same model before and it works great. There was some small problems but now it works and it is very fast.

3. 

   JAG on December 12, 2009 at 11:44 pm

   Very Stable on the following system:

   - EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 nForce 780i SLI
   
   Socket 775 A1 Version Motherboard
   
   - Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Processor, 2.83 GHz,
   
   12M L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA775
   
   - Vista Business 64-bit Operating System
   
   - Zalman CNPS9700NT Copper Heat Pipe CPU Cooler
   
   - OCZ OCZ2N800SR4GK SLI DDR2 PC2-6400
   
   4 GB Dual Channel Memory Kit
   
   - EVGA 512-P3-N976-AR e-GeForce 9800 GT
   
   Superclocked 512MB DDR3 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card
   
   - CORSAIR 650w TX Series 80 Plus Certified Power Supply

4. 

   P. Breakfield IV on December 13, 2009 at 12:07 am

   I had a pair of WD 1600 Raptors in Raid 0 on a Dell Dimension 710. When one failed I bought a pair of these hoping to get a modest improvement in speed as well as storage space. I was concerned about noise, as some reviewers have complained about these being noisy. However, compared to my previous hard drives, these are much quieter and noticeably faster. Running in Raid 0 I got HD Tune 2.55 results of:

   HD Tune: NVIDIA STRIPE 558.92G Benchmark

   Transfer Rate Minimum : 138.8 MB/sec
   
   Transfer Rate Maximum : 214.5 MB/sec
   
   Transfer Rate Average : 158.6 MB/sec
   
   Access Time : 6.9 ms
   
   Burst Rate : 178.6 MB/sec
   
   CPU Usage : 5.7%

   Install was a snap and I am very pleased with these hard drives.

5. 

   Yu-jin Chia on December 13, 2009 at 12:11 am

   First of all, let me start by saying that this is a gamer’s hard drive. If you’re not playing games, there’s very few other applications that warrant the extra cost for a bit more speed over modern large-cache 7200 RPM drives. Nowadays, your hard drive is practically guaranteed to be the bottleneck in your system. If you run apps that do frequent reads and writes it’s going to be a major bottleneck indeed.

   First off, a general breakdown on this drive. It is 279 GB after formatting (don’t freak out, that’s normal). It sports a 16 MB cache, which was crazy when it first came out but now is actually pretty average. It’s 10,000 RPM and clearly has fine-tuned mechanics, which primarily accounts for its very low seek/read/write times. The drive is a 2.5″ but comes with a built-in (and not removable) mount and heatsink that makes it a 3.5″ which is standard for most desktop internal drives. It’s a 300 GB drive according to spec- I’m not sure why it says 250 in the description above, but this drive only comes in 150 and 300 GB versions, and from the cost it’s obviously the latter. It works perfectly fine with Windows 7, Linux, etc. if this wasn’t obvious (not sure why they even mention OS compatibility in the specs).

   The drive is very quiet and uses remarkably low power for a 10k RPM. This is pretty much the best drive in its class available anywhere- there were some competitors but they seem to have given up and focused on solid state disks (SSDs) instead. If you want the fastest conventional hard drive available, with very high reliability and decent capacity, look no further. Especially in RAID, this thing just smokes any other setup. You can expect games to load data at least twice as fast as they would with a vanilla 7200 RPM.

   Now, the question everyone that’s still reading this must be asking: if you’re going to pay this much for a hard drive (cost per storage, it’s at least 5 times the cost of a high-end 7200 RPM), why not just get an SSD instead? The answer is actually pretty simple: SSDs are still way too primitive and expensive. A VelociRaptor is actually a bit faster than low end SSDs and it’s proven technology that you can expect to work for the full 5 year warranty coverage, if not longer. SSDs are relatively new to market and- as with all other flash-based tech- have limited write/rewrites that can cause problems down the road. They also don’t generally perform well with the SATA interface which is what almost all motherboards still use. If you want the fast loads for gaming, this drive is clearly a better choice than an SSD unless you only play one or two games. How many games are you going to fit on a 64 GB SSD (which is, by the way, more expensive)? Nowadays you’d be lucky to fit 5 on there besides Windows.

   If you’re willing to shell out the extra money for the fastest hard drive available, this is it. You’ll be amazed how fast it installs stuff and loads data. If you’re on a budget or don’t consider yourself an enthusiast, go for a lower-priced 7200 with a 32 MB cache.