VelociRaptor HD

Those of you into repairing or putting your own PCs together may be interested in this. I replaced the failing boot drive in my PC with Western Digital’s new 10,000 RPM SATA drive named the VelociRaptor. I am so impressed with the performance and how quiet it is that I thought I would pass it along. If you are like me and like to play with multi-layer 16-bit images in Photoshop, you WILL notice the difference.

WD 10,000 RPM SATA drives have been the market for a few years---but this new one is very different. Not only is it twice the capacity, 300GB, of their previous largest drive, it’s whisper quiet in comparison. It’s actually a 2.5 inch drive sitting on a large heat-sink the size of a normal 3.5 inch drive. I don’t know if the smaller form factor of the drive has anything to do with it, but I can barley hear the drive working, but more importantly, I can feel no vibrations through the PC case like I could with an earlier version of the 10,000 RPM drive. That to me means less wear and tear and increased potential for greater reliability. WD boasts a 30 percent performance increase over the earlier versions of their 10,000 RPM drives…while can’t substantiate that claim, I will tell you the new drive’s performance is noticeably faster.

One caution, the lateral placement of the power and data ports on the drive are not standard due to drive’s 2.5 inch form factor. Therefore, it’s probably not the drive for you if you use it in one of those “hot swappable bays” found in network/server storage cases.

Dan