Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150 - insane performance from 2.5-inch drive
Western Digital know how to make a decent drive, and with the VelociRaptor VR150 they've shown they can create an eye-catching one too. Proclaimed as the world's first 2.5-inch Serial ATA drive with a 10,000rpm spindle speed, the unit sits inside a mean looking "IcePAK" drive caddy that performs double duty as a heatsink – courtesy of the thirteen cooling fins – and as an adaptor to make the VR150 compatible with standard 3.5-inch bays. A good thing, too, as the $300 drive wouldn't be much good in a laptop: at 15mm thick it's almost double a standard 2.5-inch notebook drive. Tech Report have been putting the VelociRaptor through its paces, to see whether the drive lives up to Western Digital's performance promises.
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The short answer is yes. Offering up lashings of speed – courtesy of a smaller platter area for the drive heads to travel, together with that high spindle rpm – and the potential for lower power demands, assuming you don't thrash it, the VR150 sounds to be ideal for both enthusiast and server-builder. Review author Geoff Gasior even gives it the Editor's Choice award.
"It wasn't the fastest drive in every test and was even beaten by 7,200-RPM drives on a handful of occasions, but the VelociRaptor's combination of blazing-fast transfer rates and lightning-quick access times is a tough matchup for any Serial ATA drive" Geoff Gasior, The Tech Report
Of course, there's a payoff to performance like that, and it's cost. At $300 for 300GB, this isn't a cheap drive. Thankfully, the sort of people who need – or just plain want – hardware like this tend to budget accordingly, and from the sound of it they won't be disappointed.