Everyone who is heavy into their PC knows what a Raptor drive is, and what it stands for, fast drives that exceed the competition and enhance system performance. The Raptor was introduced as a SATA (Serial ATA) drive series to compete with the Server environments SCSI drives only for the desktop environment instead. SCSI drives were spinning at 15,000 RPMs and had excellent access and read times, but were limited to a different sector of the PC biz (Business) not to mention quite pricey. So when Western Digital introduced these 10,000 RPM drives to the desktop market it was an excellent move for them and very beneficial to the power user whether they be them gamer, artist or CAD developer or anyone who needed the speed offered in the Raptor series.
Technology has advanced since the first Raptor drives were introduced and they have evolved into their next generation product line, the all new VelociRaptor series of drives. Smaller 2.5 Drives with a dual platter design replace the standard 3.5 drive and should be faster and less power consuming than the previous Raptors, but we will have to see the results to prove this. We use only Western Digital Raptor drives in every test we currently run, and have used their drives exclusively since we started back in 1997 as they proved to be the most reliable of the brand names available. Western Digital has the easiest online RMA process and 9 out of 10 times they have fast turnaround times for end users as well. The Velociraptor series was engineered for faster seek and read times and therefore better performance, they also starts out with double the capacity of the current 150GB Raptors with 300GB available storage on the introductory model. Everything sounds good from a technical standpoint so let’s see how the Velociraptor drives differ from their Raptor counterparts, and how much faster they really are.
