Product Description Engineered for maximum speed! WD VelociRaptor, member of the unique class of 10,000 RPM SATA hard drives, combines a SATA 3Gb/s interface and 16MB cache, to deliver performance that's up to 35% faster than its speedy older brother.
Questionable reliability, great speed when they workDecember 1, 2008 Downside - It took 6 drives to get 4 that worked. I haven't checked for any bad sectors yet but expect to find some. Upside - They are lightning fast, much quieter and cooler when compared to the previous 150/160 GB versions. The 150/160GB versions sounded like a machine gun during heavy duty operation and ran hot. Mine are set up in 2 2 disk Raid 0 arrays, one array for the OS and Apps, the other for data. 5 year warranty will cover any hardware failure. I had a 150GB drive fail. WD replaced it without a problem. Recommendation(s) - If you need the speed (flight simulation, video editing, etc.), do it. I use nightly automatic backup anyway because of the Raid 0 configuration. Given the reliability issues I would back up nightly in any configuration, including Raid 5. Turn off prefetch/Superfetch and indexing unless you really need it. Make sure you have adequate cooling. Keep an eye on the SMART info that is available through Speedfan or similar hardware monitoring programs. I received plenty of warning my 150 GB was failing. I'd be amazed if you don't see a significant difference in heavy duty data access applications.
Fastest rotating SATA drive at the momentNovember 29, 2008 First, there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this drive. Regarding the position of the SATA connectors; this is a 2.5" form factor drive in a 3.5" aluminum cooling bezel for convenient use in most desktop computers. Look at the product picture and you can see this. If you need to use a drive in a docking situation where location matters, don't buy this drive.
This is the OEM version of the drive. The retail box version sells at significantly higher price. This means a warehouse worker will re-package the drive from a bulk shipping container into an anti-static bag. Mistakes can happen and it's also not really the proper way to ship hard drives, so if you want the retail box version pay the extra $50 and get it. If you roll the dice and take a chance to save the $50 then suck it up if you have to return a DOA drive once in a while.
This drive is fast and performance costs money. It is also very energy efficient and quiet when compared to the fastest 3.5" drives. I have owned every one of the WD Raptor series starting with the original 35GB and most recently the 150GB and every one of them carried a stiff price premium. All have served well in my high utilization business environment. This latest revision is the best of the bunch by a significant margin. The combination of access time, transfer rate, (finally) NCQ, and low heat and noise dissipation make this drive a very reasonable bargain for those that actually need it. It's not designed to win the $/GB prize. Write times actually beat Intel's X-25 SSD (solid state drive). If you need the performance, this is the drive.
I really do notice the speed increaseNovember 21, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I only use western digital hard drives. I have done so for the past 10+ years. I also build my own computers.
In the past I've only used 7200rpm drives and found them to be sufficient. I finally made the plunge into 10000rpm drives, when WD offered a decent memory size. The hard drive runs quiet and stays pretty cool.
I use this for my operating system and to game. Stick with 7200rpm drives for storage...at least until the price/gb drops on 10000rpm drives.
Worth the $ b/c it makes you much more productiveOctober 5, 2008 It is a bit pricey if you are looking at the pricing based on GB/$. But, it is DEFINITELY worth every penny if you want efficiency. The seek time on this drive is VERY fast. For me spending a few extra bucks is well worth it, b/c my this HD makes me much more productive.
Really fast driveSeptember 17, 2008 This is the fastest non-enterprise drive I've ever used. It benchmarks twice as fast as the stock 320GB 7200rpm drive that came in my Mac Pro. The only thing keeping it from getting 5 stars is that the SATA/Power plugs aren't in the standard spot so some modification to the computer is required to get it working with hot swap/drive sleds. WD has apparently addressed this problem in a new revision. Get that version if you have sleds/hot swap. Also, this drive is very quiet for a 10K drive. The only sound I hear from it is when the heads are accessing something.
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