Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Review
A much-needed refresh for WD's flagship speedy drive
24 June 2010 Source: www.maximumpc.com
Western Digital's latest VelociRaptor ups the ante with 600GB of space and a 6Gb/s SATA controller, but the drive now has to compete with solid state drives and high-capacity, high-performance drives like WD's own Caviar Black series.
In this review, Maximum PC take a look at the WD VelociRaptor 600GB hard drive.
The label reads Enterprise Storage, but we suspect that plenty of VelociRaptors will find homes in enthusiast rigs...
...Make no mistake: The new VelociRaptor, with its 32MB of cache and 6Gb/s transfer rates, is the fastest mechanical SATA drive we've ever tested...
...With average sustained read and write speeds greater than 130MB/s, it's fully a third faster than the last-gen VelociRaptor, which averaged around 100MB/s for both. Random-access times hit around 7.1ms - about the same as the last-gen VelociRaptor, and about twice the speed of a fast 7,200rpm drive...
...We still think there's a niche for the VelociRaptor. It does deserve big props for being the fastest mechanical SATA drive on the market, and its sustained read and write speeds are faster than the fastest first-gen SSDs. It's the best single-drive compromise between the capacity and price per gigabyte of a 7,200rpm drive and the raw speed of an SSD...
...The VelociRaptor isn't the fastest drive you can get, nor the most capacious, but if you just want one drive that does it all, the newly refreshed VelociRaptor is still a compelling choice.
View the WD Velociraptor range