Post by Flasher on May 13, 2008 23:20:16 GMT 10
Computer hardware is often outdated as soon as you've clicked the 'order' button on a website these days. One thing that hasn't really had amazing technological revolutions recently like video cards and cpus is the humble old hard drive. Thats set to change.
Back in the day, the Western Digital Raptor range of drives was the best money could buy you in terms of raw speed and performance. Slowly however, minor advances in hard drive technology brought most drives to a level of performance on-par with the Raptor - if not better.
Thats now changed - with the upcoming Western Digital VelociRaptor, a 300gb drive set at a price point of $300USD, which will be available in mid May.
The VelociRaptor is a little bit pricey in comparison to a standard 7,200RPM drive, the VelociRaptor sports a few cunning features which are innovative for a high-performance dekstop drive. Firstly, its 2.5", not 3.5". (It does however come with a 'Ice-Pack' heatsink which encages the beast, and also allows us to mount it normally in our desktop cases.
The drive runs at 10,000RPM, which while also being over 9,000, is the standard speed at which Raptor drives have spun in the past. Utilising a SATA 3 Gb/s interface, the VelociRaptor is only, suprsingly given 16MB of cache. I'm not sure if extra cache could adeversely effect the performance too much, but it puzzles me why the drive doesn't have 32MB cache - as has been popping up on many rival drives.
With an advertised transfer rate of 120MB/s, and seek times for reading of 4.2ms, with write seek times at 4.7 ms. The performance of the VelociRaptor is claimed to be about 35% faster than previous drives in the Raptor generation, which is an impressive feat. For full tech specs, and performance benchmarks, there are a few reviews around the place - with a RAID 0 configuration looking formiddible performance wise.
Even though it seems to be pretty expensive - and lord knows what prices we'll see locally, it looks like the VelociRaptor is the hottest kid on the block when it comes to raw performance hard drive wise. With a five year warranty, and Western Digital's solid history of reliablity, this looks like a worthy addition to a top-end gaming rig.
It doesn't quite outperform a solid state drive on paper, but in terms of bang for buck, it offers pretty uncompromsing performance - and lets be honest, who in their right mind would spend in excess of $1,000 on a solid state drive? The VelociRaptor looks like a winner to me. -IGN
games.internode.on.net/content.php?mode=news&id=2963
Back in the day, the Western Digital Raptor range of drives was the best money could buy you in terms of raw speed and performance. Slowly however, minor advances in hard drive technology brought most drives to a level of performance on-par with the Raptor - if not better.
Thats now changed - with the upcoming Western Digital VelociRaptor, a 300gb drive set at a price point of $300USD, which will be available in mid May.
The VelociRaptor is a little bit pricey in comparison to a standard 7,200RPM drive, the VelociRaptor sports a few cunning features which are innovative for a high-performance dekstop drive. Firstly, its 2.5", not 3.5". (It does however come with a 'Ice-Pack' heatsink which encages the beast, and also allows us to mount it normally in our desktop cases.
The drive runs at 10,000RPM, which while also being over 9,000, is the standard speed at which Raptor drives have spun in the past. Utilising a SATA 3 Gb/s interface, the VelociRaptor is only, suprsingly given 16MB of cache. I'm not sure if extra cache could adeversely effect the performance too much, but it puzzles me why the drive doesn't have 32MB cache - as has been popping up on many rival drives.
With an advertised transfer rate of 120MB/s, and seek times for reading of 4.2ms, with write seek times at 4.7 ms. The performance of the VelociRaptor is claimed to be about 35% faster than previous drives in the Raptor generation, which is an impressive feat. For full tech specs, and performance benchmarks, there are a few reviews around the place - with a RAID 0 configuration looking formiddible performance wise.
Even though it seems to be pretty expensive - and lord knows what prices we'll see locally, it looks like the VelociRaptor is the hottest kid on the block when it comes to raw performance hard drive wise. With a five year warranty, and Western Digital's solid history of reliablity, this looks like a worthy addition to a top-end gaming rig.
It doesn't quite outperform a solid state drive on paper, but in terms of bang for buck, it offers pretty uncompromsing performance - and lets be honest, who in their right mind would spend in excess of $1,000 on a solid state drive? The VelociRaptor looks like a winner to me. -IGN
games.internode.on.net/content.php?mode=news&id=2963
