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Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Review – How Fast This Drive?

If you're looking for the best performance and reliability you can count on Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB hard drive. In order to increase the seeking time speed of hard drive, the revolution per minute (RPM) should also increase. This is what the western Digital did to VelociRaptor, a hard drive that aims to increase its reliability and data security because this belong enterprise environment.

VelociRaptor is packed with 600GB of disk space in a three platter design that spins insanely at 10,000 rpm, this is one of the fastest spindle speed out there aside from Seagate Cheetah 15K.7. This is bounded by a 3.5 inch casing that serves as the heatsink which they called "IcePack", the drive itself has a physical size of 2.5 inch. The reason why western digital engineers design it that way is that, smaller disk are denser thus making it even faster for the heads in seeking data for less travel time.

Contributing to its high speed performance is the SATA 6GB/s interface with a maximum transfer speed of 300MB/s, in addition to that a 32MB cache that handles the most frequent accessed data without the need to pull it from the disk. A dual processor controller is also provided that creates a high impact to its speed performance. As a result, it has the capability of up to 145MB/s transfer data rate.

Some of the best features are the RAFF, No Touch Ramp and Ultra Cool Operation. The Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward is an anti vibration protection. No touch Ramp load technology finds in all Western Digital drives, the head ensures that it doesn't touch the disk during read/write operations for faster and less wear to heads. The Ultra Cool Operation introduces a low power consumption during idle.

Specs

2.5-inch bare drive

600 GB Capacity

3.5-inch w/IcePack configurations

10,000 RPM

32 MB buffer

Data Transfer Rate (Buffer to Disk) 145MB/s

15mm z-height

3-platter design with 200 GB/platter

Data path protection

Manufactured to Enterprise Reliability Standards

1.4 million hours MTBF

24x7 Power on (8760 annual POH)

Error Recovery

RAID-specific time-limited error recovery (TLER)

Vibration Tolerance

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (Enhanced RAFF)

600k Head Load / Unload Cycles

Data LifeGuard 3

5-year Warranty

WD VelociRaptor 600GB In Action

The new WD VelociRaptor read performance shows a 30 percent faster than the older version with 300GB and an increase of 18 percent in high performance capacity. Using the SANDRA's write performance test, this drive performs about 25 percent faster than its competition. Compare with other 2TB hard drive, the VelociRaptor 600GB is still faster than the rest.

Conclusion

The VelociRaptor is a solid performer no doubt about it, its vast improvement over the previous version has clearly seen. Its price since the introduction in April last year has dropped up to 40% making it more affordable to everyone. This would definitely a wise choice compare to a high price equivalent of only 128MB SSD, with this you can have an advantage of 4.7 times the disk space.   

Admittedly, it's a bit on a high price level in cost per Gigabyte it offers for only 600GB compare to commonly available 2TB but the speed it offers is a killer. A must have if you're constantly seeking for high speed performance enterprise drive. A generous 5-year warranty is a big plus for this and you got nothing to lose here. This is definitely the fastest hard drive your money can buy, a worthy additional to your computer rig. 

Read the full Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Review and discover the Fastest Hard Drive of today. 

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