WD VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS

David Field spins up to operating speed in order to check out the latest from Western Digital.

The old Western Digital Raptors have been getting, well -- hmm, how to put this delicately -- trounced by standard 7200RPM drives, as capacities rocket toward (and beyond!) the terabyte point.

High capacity drives pack more data onto the platter, which means more data is passed under the head assembly per rotation than lower density drives. And as the largest Raptor you could get used to be 150GB, the shine was taken off its highest raw throughput crown as other drives increased their capacity. It was the Raptor’s low latencies, a product of its high spindle speed, where the drive really shone.

Western Digital has pulled off a few tricks to make the new Velociraptor compete. The capacity is now at 300GB, and most interestingly the drive has shrunk to the 2.5in size of SAS server drives. (Update: it turns out that Western Digital has indeed used these drives as their first entry into the server market, but has kept the SATA interface, which can be addressed by SAS controllers anyway). They look like laptop hard drives, but are 12mm thick (instead of 9) and need 12 volts to run instead of five, so you won’t be able to get them running in your laptop without serious modding. We salute those of you (and your disposable incomes) who plan to try anyway.

It now uses a SATA 2 interface, and during burst transfers can actually use the extra bandwidth that SATA 2 provides. The small, fast platters (there are two of them) push 249 MB/s at their peak burst mode, and average about 110MB when they read. Most impressive are the seek times, which are at 7.2ms in our HD Tach synthetic tests.

To keep things cool, the Velociraptor comes screwed to a large heatsink, dubbed the Icepak. It keeps the small drive compatible with current cases, because you screw the heatsink, not the drive, into your 3.5in bay – just be aware that the drive’s power and SATA connectors don’t line up with the standard position that you get with normal hard drives, so you won’t be able to slide one into a drive caddy. Which you shouldn’t be doing for heat reasons anyway.

It wins the game of transfer speed and low latency. The fastest consumer hard drive is now back on its pedestal.