Western Digital sent us a couple of their latest premium, performance hard drives to have a look at. We decided to do an up to date review on the monster known as “The VelociRaptor”.

The drives are from the “Enterprise Storage” family, and are the highest quality drives manufactured by the storage device giant. Knowing that Enterprise storage drives are designed and manufactured to suit the demands of servers, and enthusiast systems, and backed up with a 5 year warranty, we can be sure the quality is second to none.

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty, and see what exactly we are looking at here!

What we find quite interesting from the specifications listed, and also from our image, is that the VelociRaptor is actually a 2.5”drive! To make it into a 3.5”drive, Western Digital have wrapped it in a huge heat sink, which I think is a clever idea. This obviously explains the rumoured reliability, as the heat sink acts as not only extra physical protection if needed, but also dramatically reduces heat build up on the super fast spinning drive. Besides the practical facts, the heat sink actually makes the drive look genuinely cool!

Our test system used is a recent build by Exile5 team Manager “1MMort4L”, in which he used CM Storm, CoolerMaster and Western Digital products to complete.

Test system:

We started by putting the drives into our new CM Storm Enforcer case, and I must say, this was a breeze with the clip in design CM Storm have used on this case. The Enforcer itself was amazingly well priced at only $99 au, and i was genuinely surprised at how well designed it is.

The simple process of installing the VelociRaptors into the CM Storm Enforcer, was literally as easy as the following pictures show.

Just like that, we had the drives installed, and we were ready to go!

There is something great about the feeling of having consistency with a pc build, and as you can see from this image, having 3 Hard Drives from Western Digital sitting in the drive bays with each other, really does look the goods! Notice the Caviar Black on top, and the 2 VelociRaptors below.

With all the pretty stuff out the way, let’s get down to the results!

HD Tune Pro tests:

We decided to compare “The fastest SATA HDD on the Planet” with a more common configuration that is found in the PC gaming world. We all know that WD VelociRaptors are fast but how much faster than the WD Caviar Black configurations are they?

Let’s have a look at some graphs. The WD Caviar Black 1TB drives can be purchase for approx $160 each where as the WD VelociRaptors are approx $260 each. Although there is a bit of a price jump from the Caviar Blacks to the VelociRaptors, is the performance jump really worth it?

From the tests run we can see that the VelociRaptor configurations are much faster than the Caviar Black configurations. The result is much more noticeable in the HD Tune read tests above. This will be party explained because the VelociRaptor HD’s are a 10,000 rpm drive compared to 7,200 rpm for the Caviar Blacks. Also the VelociRaptor drives we tested (WD3000HLHX) are the 5^th Generation drive from Western Digital with the latest goodies packed into the drive.

In conclusion, the WD3000HLHX VelociRaptor is a very quick hard drive. It may not be as fast as the latest SSD but is still the fastest SATA Hard Drive on the planet. The tests we ran above reinforced this claim.

Sure the VelociRaptor hard drives are at a premium price compared to the Caviar Black hard drives but if you want a solidly built hard drive with outstanding performance both in game and while working with your favourite applications, then the 5^th generation VelociRaptor hard drives are for you.

Whilst the VelociRaptor isn’t really marketed to compete with an SSD, it does suit many buyers that have performance and speed in mind and want substantial storage space available.

Hopefully this review will give you a better understanding of your needs and allow you to make a more informed choice for your next storage solution. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them up in our tech section of the website here

http://www.team-exile5.org/forums/showthread.php?t=4688

Thank you for reading this review of Western Digital’s latest 5^th Generation VelociRaptor hard drive, from Exile5

1mmort4l