Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS Hard Disk Drive Review

Conclusions

It is clear that 10,000 rpm hard disk drives are way faster than mainstream 7,200 rpm drives. During our tests VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS achieved a burst transfer rate between 11% and 55% higher and an average transfer rate 68% higher than the one achieved by Seagate Barracuda 7200.10. So we are talking about a really high-end hard disk drive.

Then we built a RAID0 system with two Barracuda 7200.10 160 GB hard disk drives – a setup that costs 1/3 of the price of VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS and results in the same total capacity – to see how the new VelociRaptor is compared to a RAID0 system built with two mainstream drives.

On SpeedDisk32 and HDTach our RAID0 achieved a higher burst rate (37% and 34% higher, respectively) than the new VelociRaptor. On HDTune VelociRaptor achieved a burst transfer rate 40% higher than our RAID0 array. Our RAID0 array showed a higher maximum and average transfer rates on HDTach (8% higher average transfer rate) and HDTune (5% higher maximum transfer rate and 8% higher average transfer rate), but on SpeedDisk32 VelociRaptor was faster (28% higher maximum transfer rate and 8% maximum average transfer rate) than our RAID0 array.

When comparing VelociRaptor to other single disks, yes, it is faster. The problem is that you can build a RAID0 system using two mainstream drives and have a faster system that costs only 1/3 of the price (provided that you have a motherboard that supports RAID).

However if you have money to build “the fastest PC in town” then you can try building a RAID0 with two VelociRaptors, it will beat a RAID0 array using mainstream drives for sure – but costing six times more.

We want once again apologize for the error we made of not removing the compatibility jumper from our Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives, which caused the results we published before to be wrong. This is also a good advice: don’t forget to remove this jumper when installing a new SATA-300 hard drive in order to allow it to achieve its maximum performance.