Western Digital VelociRaptor (1TB) - Spin Me Right Round
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Conclusion
Fast, but not "SSD" Fast
As expected, even the newest iteration of Western Digital’s famed VelociRaptor drive falls short of challenging SSDs when it comes to outright performance. While sequential read/write speeds are actually pretty decent, these are not indicative of actual everyday usage. And when it comes to random access operations and dealing with small data blocks, mechanical HDDs and the physical limitations of their moving parts simply cannot keep up with the entirely electronic SSDs.
Nevertheless, the newest VelociRaptor drive is markedly quicker than the old drive which it replaces. Looking at our results, the new VelociRaptor, despite the much larger capacity (1TB vs 300GB), was significantly faster than the older VelociRaptor in all aspects. On a whole, the drive was roughly around 25% to 30% quicker and that’s a rather remarkable achievement considering how mature mechanical HDD technology already is. This is definitely the fastest consumer hard disk you can get your hands on.
Therefore, for users who need the reliability of a traditional mechanical HDD and also the capacity, the new Western Digital VelociRaptor comes highly recommended. It won’t outperform any SSD, but it is backed by the tried-and-tested reliability of being a mechanical drive based solution and also Western Digital’s esteemed VelociRaptor brand. Furthermore, with a recommended price of S$429 for the 1TB drive, the VelociRaptor is much more economical than any SSD.
To put this into perspective, one of the more affordable 512GB SSD units we could find costs around S$650, while the most expensive was a whopping S$1049. Taking $650 as our point of reference, what this means is that for the price of two such SSDs (to make up 1TB), you could buy three VelociRaptor drives for a grand total of 3TB. Or, you could easily get two VelociRaptor drives and have them in a RAID 0 configuration for even more performance. Something to think about perhaps?
Not to forget, you still have smaller capacity VelociRaptor drive options such as a 500GB and 250GB models that are pegged at S$289 and S$219 respectively and are very competitively priced to replace the older 150GB and 300GB editions of the VelociRaptor drives. Granted that it's still three times the cost of normal 7,200RPM drives, it's also a good degree faster than them and is safe option should you not want to muck around with the SSD units which are far from being mature at this point of time.
To drive home the importance of reliability and dependability, Western Digital is also offering VelociRaptor with a 5-year warranty. In a time when hard drive manufacturers are cutting back on their warranties, the offer of a 5-year warranty is much welcomed and shows just how confident Western Digital is of their flagship hard drive product.
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