Key Features

Killer Speed - Built on the performance bloodlines of WD Raptor, these 10,000 RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-bending performance. Not only are they 35 percent faster than the previous generation WD Raptor drives, but they also beat out all other competitors in the field.

Rock-solid Reliability - Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. With 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive.

Double the Capacity - State-of-the-art technology packs twice the capacity per disk compared to its older brother WD Raptor resulting in 300 GB of high-performance storage space in this enterprise-class 2.5-inch drive. (Not compatible with notebook computers)

IcePack™ Mounting Frame - The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF™) - Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

SecurePark™ - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

Designed unlike anything you have ever seen before

These latest drives from western digital are very unique comparing to other hard Drives, they are 10,000 rpm sata drives but what’s most unique about them is there size, they are 2.5 inch drives screwed into a heat sink that is 3.5 inch in size! They also have two 150gig platters making them 300gig. They are also very light, weighing 480 grams each,  also these baby’s are very quiet comparing to their older brother the 150gig Raptor, at idle they average 29db and get up to 39db when in use, and also run a lot cooler.

Pictured here with their older borther, Velociraptors on the left 150gig Raptors ont the right.

So far they seem to be a great upgrade from their older brother but lets see how they perform.

Test setup:

XFX 790i Ultra

4gig XMS DDR3

E8500 Core2 Duo

9800GX2

Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

HDtach 3.0.1.0

Today i will be testing these cards using HDtach 3, This is a software Benchmarking utility that measures a number of things like, Random Access times, CPU Usage, Burst speed and sequential Read Speed. I will be running the two velociraptors in Raid0 with 128k,64k,32k stripes and will also be running a single drive to see the difference running raid0 makes with them.

Test 1. Single Drive:

You can see here the sequential read starts off very good then slows down towards the end, an average read speed of 108 MB/s and a random access speed of 6.9ms is very good for a single drive, on average a standard 7200rpm hard drive will manage only 50-60 MB/s and 16.7ms for random access speed!

Test 2. Raid0 128k Stripe

Now here is where things start getting weird, Lots of spikes!, I have not experienced anything like this before with the older raptors in raid, showing a better average but with drops in the sequential read speed all over the place.

Test 3. 64k Stripe

Again we see those massive spikes throughout the graph, a 64k stripe showing better average read speeds at 174 MB/s

Test 4. 32k stripe

Still no luck on getting read of the crazy Sequential read speed performance, managing 181 MB/s 32k is fastest out of the tests but using a lot more CPU usage as smaller files need to be written to both drives more often.

After looking into the weird performance of these drives I came across some information about disabling NCQ or

Native Command Queuing. Going to Device manager and then Nforce Raid controller gave me the option to turn it off, which I did, I also disabled Drive indexing in the hard drive properties and this was the result.

The spikes have been reduced dramatically and the performance has improved, 195 MB/s!!

Conclusion

These Little monsters really perform well, and out do their older brother in every test, the only problem for me was the price, at $399au a pop its not in the reach of the average enthusiest.

Maxishines verdict:

Performance 9/10

Price 5/10