Western Digital Velociraptor:

The WD Hard Drive

The Western Digital Velociraptor is an excellent hard drive to build gaming computers (for best gaming computers) or workstations. The WD hard drive is named after velociraptor; a fast running raptor.

The Western Digital Velociraptor is reliable and an excellent performer; this hard drive smokes. This is an enthusiast hard drive that has the reliability and performance to work to build gaming computers and for workstation builds.

The Velociraptor maxes out its capacity at 300GB, and is a 2.5" form factor. This allows faster access times, and helps keep temperatures and energy consumption down. (Note that due to the height of the drive, it is not compatible with laptops.)

The Velociraptor comes standard with 16MB cache, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.4 million hours, and maxes out the noise levels at around 35 dB.

Since the drive is a 2.5 inch form factor, it comes pre-installed in a 3.5 inch frame called the Icepack, that also acts as a heat sink for the drive.

This allows you to install the WD hard drive into an existing drive bay on your desktop computer. In benchmark tests, the Velociraptor performs excellently:

• Access Time - 7.0ms
• Maximum Throughput - 198.5 MB/s
• Average Read Transfer Rates - 102 MB/s
• Average Write Transfer Rates - 101.6 MB/s
• Drive Surface Temperature - 35C
  

The Velociraptor is one of the leaders in enthusiast hard drives and is even able to compete with SSDs (Solid State Drives); it's used in many of the best gaming computer builds. Aside from the price, these hard drives are currently retailing for around $250.00 (which is quite a bit for a 300GB hard drive) but for the enthusiast crowd, they are a great value for the drive.

Related Information

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