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Final Thoughts: Speed versus Capacity versus Price

Overall performance is quite good, while write performance is particularly excellent—and likely to be better than most (but not all) solid state drives. However, even at $299, it's still vastly less expensive than solid state drives of much lower capacity. Given its substantial performance advantage over 7,200RPM drives, we'll no doubt see these arriving in most enthusiast-class systems and lower-end workstations. For those users, performance trumps capacity for the system drive. After all, you can always add a big 7,200RPM drive (or array) as a secondary drive, if you need capacity.

One other thing to consider: The VelociRaptor is designed to enterprise class standards, with a 1.2 million hour MTBF rating—considerably more than most standard 7,200RPM desktop drives. That's something else to consider, particularly if you plan on running in a striped array configuration.

If you crave the fastest rotating hard drive for desktop PCs, then you'll want the VelociRaptor. While the price per unit capacity ratio is high relative to its 640GB, 7,200RPM cousin, it's much speedier in real world applications. However, it is limited to 300GB, so if you crave more drive space, you'll want to either use multiple drives in a striped array or give up some performance and go with a bigger drive. If performance rules your world, you'll want at least two...{more}

The drive has a unique appearance. As you can see from the photos, this is really a 2.5-inch mechanism built into a 3.5-inch, cast metal sled that also acts as a heat sink, something the WDC marketing folks have labeled the "IcePAK."

b-man1 wrote:good stuff! the sweet spot for enterprise (mid-tier) storage IMHO is the 2.5" 15k SAS drives. they run us about ~$340/drive. it would be nice to start seeing that type of technology at the consumer level. the controllers would add a good chunk to the cost though. some day...

TheSovereign wrote:its wd... what good is speed if u rebuild the computer every month