Western Digital picked an extremely appropriate name for its new 10,000 rpm (rotations per minute) hard drive. Dubbed the VelociRaptor, this new drive, introduced today, screamed through our performance tests in the PC World Test Center. Velocity is clearly the raison d'etre for this drive: It handily bested our tested field of hard drives to become our top overall performer.

Unlike many hard drives, which show strengths and weaknesses in our tests, the VelociRaptor actually demonstrated its strength across the PC World Test Center's entire suite of hard drive tests; it came out on top time and again. The VelociRaptor's most dramatic results: The required just 89 seconds to write 3.06GB of files and folders, besting the next-best drive in our chart, the Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB, by 32 seconds--an impressive improvement of 26 percent.

The VelociRaptor is an interesting drive for more than just its performance, though: The latest in Western Digital's family of Raptor 10,000 rpm drives, the 300GB VelociRaptor doubles the capacity of WD's previous-generation 150GB Raptor drive.

WD plans to target the drive at gamers and PC enthusiasts first, even though the VelociRaptor has been designed for enterprise-class applications, too, and the company expects it to be adopted in enterprise settings as well. The drive carries a mean time between failure rating of 1.2 million hours, which puts it on a par with enterprise-grade drives.

Press Release | Western Digital: Product Page | Full Article

Western Digital, VelociRaptor, Caviar, HDD, Hard Disk, Hard Drive, Testing, Performance, Storage, Hardware, SATA, WD3000GLFS[ /tags]