Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB Hard Drive Review

While SSDs have mostly been in the spotlight these days when it comes to storage, the spinning platter hard drives are still alive and kicking. With the proliferation of and the amount of space occupied by digital music and video files, storage needs have skyrocketed and SSDs just haven’t come down in price enough on the large capacity drives for the average user to afford. Before SSDs, drive makers boosted read/write speeds by increasing the spin speed of the platters which eventually reached 15,000 RPMs, but were typically limited in capacity. Western Digital launched their 300GB VelociRaptor in 2008 which was a big success and it brought relatively large capacity storage (at the time) with high performance. Now, Western Digital has upped the ante again with a 1TB version of the 10,000 RPM spinner and sent us one over to run it through our tests.

In addition to the increased capacity, they’ve also updated the cache to a beefy 64MB and a SATA interface to 6Gbps so as not to bottleneck the drive. All of this increases performance by 25% according to Western Digital with read/write specifications of 200MB/s. It also offers an impressive 1.4 million hours MTBF and according to Western Digital, this leads the industry for a high capacity SATA drive. To help facilitate this, it features NoTouch ramp load technology where the recording head never touches the media, reducing wear on the recording head. They offer a five year warranty to cover their workmanship as well. For the MSRP of $319.00 you can pick one up starting today.