Western Digital Velociraptor
You certainly remember the Raptor HDD series from Western Digital, as they are still some of the fastest SATA drives on the market. A couple of years ago, SDDs appeared out of nowhere and somehow ruined WD’s and Seagate’s future plans (not that they were planning to come up with a sort of successor for the HDD format of their own).
So, if you need to have the fastest storage drives, you either choose the Raptor or whatever SDD you can get your hands on. Oh wait, those still cost a fortune… well, looks like you’re stuck with 7,200 RPM HDDs. Hm? What? WD has some new cheap Raptor variant?
The direct heir of the Raptor family is dubbed the Velociraptor, supposedly priced at around $300. It supports the 3GB/s SATA standard, has a capacity of 300GB, 16 MB cache and spins your data at 10,000 RPM, just like the previous Raptor. The new drive actually comes in a 2.5" size factor, but has a massive "Icepack" heatsink that makes it large enough to fit in a 3.5" bay.
Preliminary tests made by Maximum PC proved that Velociraptor is faster than the older Raptor or any other HDD in any
possible way. However, Maximum PC also tested it against a $1,950 Mtron Pro-series 64-gigabyte SSD and found out that WD’s little wonder can’t really compete with the SDD pack.
But hey, it’s only 300 bucks…. it doesn’t get more cost-effective than this. Come to think of it, it’s a 2.5” HDD so maybe you can rip that heatsink off and squeeze it into your laptop.
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