Western Digital VR150 300GB Velociraptor Review :: WD VR150 300GB Velociraptor Features

• Product Family VR150
• Model WD3000GLFS
• 3.5 inch 10000 RPM (2.5-inch HDA, 15mm z-height)
• 2 platters 4 heads
• Ships mounted in the WD IcePAK for placement in 3.5 inch
• Capacity 300GB
• Cache: 16MB
• Seek Time Read: 4.2ms
• Seek Time Write: 4.7ms
• Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward
• SecureParks

In many ways the evolution of the Raptor to the Velociraptor is pretty clear. The Raptor was known as the fastest drive with a 10,000 RPM disk speed. WD decided to keep the disk speed the same as there isn’t another drive in this class with higher speeds as of yet. Seek times are improved over the original Raptor in both Read and Write speeds. As we’ll see in the performance section of the review, the Velociraptor completely dominates the Raptor in Seek Time performance.

The move to 300GB is a logical progression as the earlier Raptor drives had capacities of 36, 74, 150GB models. One thing to keep in mind is the size of the Velociraptor is almost the same size as a laptop drive, meaning you get double the capacity in a much smaller package as compared to the original Raptor drives. With Terabyte drives on the market the increased space is great news for those wanting more hard drive space but wanting the increased performance as well. The smaller discs allows for faster access times as the distance between the edge and the center of the platter is smaller than its 3.5 predecessor. 16MB of buffer is currently what other WD drives have, but it would be interesting to see a drive with a 32MB buffer could offer in terms of performance.

Western Digital mounted the drive on their new IcePAK HDD enclosure, which is for mounting in a 3.5 inch hard bay. Most people have multiple 3.5 inch bays in their case including Mac Pro computers so this makes perfect sense to do this. The IcePAK also has the function of keeping the HDD cool during operation as it is a heatsink as well as a drive enclosure. Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward optimizes performance when the drives are used in a vibration prone mutli-drive chassis. SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. SecurePark makes sure that the recording head never touches the disk surface increasing long term reliability. The 2.5 size is not a true laptop sized 2.5 as the laptop drives are still much smaller in thickness, so the Velocirapor is like a midsized car with a V8 installed in it.

Here’s a chart comparing the features of the Raptor to the Velociraptor:

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