Western Digital’s new Velociraptor has only been available for around a month worldwide, and wonder of wonders, HWZ’s demo unit arrived with nary any drama – ahead of anyone else in our little corner of the world. We give to you a quick look-see at the currently most desirable piece of storage for the enthusiast – officially designated as the WD3000GLFS, the VelociRaptor.

Initial impressions admittedly gave me a cheesy feeling with its name – VelociRaptor just feels a tad too long. Nonetheless, “Raptor” for the first to third generations of this product sounded presumptuous at first – but fit just perfectly after the first tests and benchmarks came out. We have the same story with the VelociRaptor – a marked improvement over all performance values compared to its previous iteration.

                                             Taking a closer look, we see it's actually a 2.5" hard disk.

Selected reviews have popped up online, and HWZ will be performing its own comparison in the near future. In the meantime, a quick run-down is in order: the VelociRaptor is a 2.5” SATA, mechanical (with spinning discs) hard drive attached to a proprietary 3.5” hard disk adapter meant for easy installation in computers of its intended market – the consumer market. The clarification of it being a “mechanical” hard disk comes from the recent increase in SSD (Solid State Drive) sales, and its potential challenge to this new Raptor. The adaptor on the other hand, deserves special mention due to its design as both an adapter and a passive cooling device for the 10,000rpm spindle-speed VelociRaptor. Very appropriately named “IcePak”, this adapter/heatsink is a solid piece of aluminum with lightly designed strakes and fins lining its periphery – very attractive, for a storage device. While the size is 3.5” for the whole device, the SATA Hard disk itself is of course still a 2.5” sized drive, meaning the SATA and Power connectors are not in their usual places as in a normal desktop hard disk.

                                             A regular laptop hard disk has a thickness of 9mm compared to the VelociRaptor's 15mm. Thanks to techreport.com for comparative pictures.

Fans of the series may wonder if there is a transparent window on the drive showing the platters, but for now, this new Raptor doesn’t have one (hopefully, just "not yet"). Unlike its bigger brother though, this raptor has much more to boast about than a transparent window – performance values give a thumping to the old 150GB Raptor – most obviously in the size department. While 300GB is nothing to be ashamed of, it doesn’t approach the latest and greatest capacities, currently standing at around 1 Terabyte. This size disparity is of course done in the name of performance, achieved through a 10,000rpm spindle speed, combined with two 150GB, super-dense discs, and connected to the fast 3.0GBps SATA interface.

                                             Comparison between previous gen Raptor, a laptop hard disk and the VelociRaptor. Thanks to techreport.com for comparative pics.

Storage Review performed a detailed benchmark series listing some of the more common drive benchmarks such as random access time, sequential transfer rates, a customized DriveMark ’06 benchmark, and a series of real – world tests. For our purposes, a lucid view of the most common task of a PC benchmarker – re-installing an OS and drivers – will figure in an in-depth test in the future. Other real-world tests will also be performed to better gauge its performance in an easy-to-understand way. Suffice to say that in all tests, the VelociRaptor was in the top spot, usually with a large margin, over even some server drives being tested. This is especially evident in the consumer benchmark testing, meaning (usually) a single-user environment. This is a significant point to make because the Veliciraptor is essentially a server drive adapted to the consumer market, meaning it retains some of the most desirable aspects of an enterprise drive – a 1.4 million MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) – an industry measurement that gives an average failure point after time-passed. Warranty period is also affected positively, with Western digital offering a full five years.

                                             Note the placement of the SATA and power connectors.

With this many advantages, why doesn’t more people buy into this great product? One word: price. $300 equates to around P12500 at today’s conversion rate, which is just depressing for a capacity of 300GB. Drives more than twice the VelociRaptor’s size costs less – always a factor for both the budget conscious and the storage – addicted. Then again, Wester Digital isn’t aiming for the run-of-the-mill storage hound, it is the enthusiast and performance hounds who gets the goods this time, and it seems like WD is also using this opportunity as a “thank you” for the enthusiast market that welcomed the original Raptor heartily. Expensive it might be, but absolute performance always is.