The Terabyte Raptor
Western Digital’s older Raptor and current-gen VelociRaptor drives have usually been considered the fastest non-SCSI consumer hard drives, spinning at 10,000 RPM. Their weakness, however, has usually been the relatively higher cost per GB than other hard drives of similar capacity, while not quite offering the performance of a solid-state drive.
WD’s finally bridged the gap between high-speed enterprise and consumer mass storage, with the new 1TB version of the VelociRaptor, with a SATA III controller and 64MB of cache.
Still being a hard drive, you’re likely to see sequential read/write speeds around 200 MB/s, which is well within SATA II limits only. Most current gen SSDs are able to saturate even a SATA III controller, which is over 500 MB/s, but most 7200 RPM HDDs are usually unable to cross 150 MB/s, so speed is surely a selling point.
But why would you really want to shell out `15K on a 1TB VelociRaptor, when you could buy a regular 1TB drive for 1/3rd of the price? After all, you’re not looking at a three-fold performance increase. The answer is that if you do a lot of digital content creation like video editing, a standard HDD might not cut it, especially if the time spent by your machine importing, processing and exporting video equals the money being lost on your part.
An SSD won’t cut it either, as you’ll need a bit of space, and if you don’t have over `70K to spend on a terabyte of solid-state storage, the 1TB VelociRaptor is an ideal option. Plus in a RAID array, you’ll likely hit excess of 400 MB/s in sequential operations.
Commenting on the launch of Velociraptor 1TB in India, Khwaja Saifuddin, Director Sales, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, says, “The high performance 1 TB WD VelociRaptor is aimed at enabling power users such as gaming enthusiasts and media professionals to push their creative boundaries. The drive delivers the ultimate combination of speed and storage, and Indian professionals with heavy computing requirements will be delighted with its power-packed performance.”
The drive is a 2.5" device with a heatsink-cum-adapter that allows it to fit in a standard 3.5" drive bay in your workstation.
WD guarantees 24x7 operation and throws in a five-year warranty, which is probably one of the longest you’ll find for a consumer drive.
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