Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB SATA600

Overview

TechSpot Metascore

Based on 20 expert reviews

Excellent:

9
Good:

8
Average:

1
Bad:

2

Pros:

Silent operation.
Really fast.
Much more reasonably priced than SSD.

Cons:

SATA 3 speeds are barely faster than SATA 2.
Sequential read speeds still almost half of SSD.

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Last revision on January 10, 2013

Reviewers Liked

Silent operation
Really fast
Much more reasonably priced than SSD
Fast read speeds and very fast write speeds
Impressive capacity for such a speedy drive
6Gb/s SATA
10,000 RPM

Reviewers Didn't Like

SATA 3 speeds are barely faster than SATA 2
Sequential read speeds still almost half of SSD
Value proposition is not strong enough
Slower than some budget SSDs at booting Windows
Expensive compared with Seagate's Momentus XT hybrid hard drive

Expert reviews and ratings

Back in the day, ok, about 2 years ago, when everybody was stuck with 7,400 RPM hard drives in their PCs, it was Western Digital who rocked the market with their first VelociRaptor SATA hard drives running at 10,000 RPM with 32MB cache. While...

By Tbreak.com on December 13, 2010

The "which drive" conflict has raged for a long time. The self-same people who thought the original VelociRaptor was too expensive for the tiny capacity then moved on to complaining how Solid State Drives are too expensive for their tiny capacity.As...

By Overclock3D on November 02, 2010

Our WD6000HLHX drive is the latest update and brings the maximum capacity up to 600GB. (Its predecessor topped out at 300GB.)Retailing for US $329 or $0.55 per gigabyte the VelociRaptor is an expensive buy. WD's own 7200rpm 1TB Black Edition drive...

By ITP.net on November 01, 2010

You’ll notice during our performance analysis that we’ve specifically not compared the VelociRaptor to an SSD, and this is because, while they're both forms of high-performance storage, we don’t feel the two can be fairly compared....

By Bit-tech.net on August 23, 2010

Face it, it’s hard to get excited over hard drives. That is, until one becomes the bottleneck in your video-streaming server or gaming machine. I’m always subjected to far longer load-screens than I’d like; while I’d love to go...

By PCWorld New Zealand on July 26, 2010

Huge storage space, very nice performance, only $0.72 per usable...

By Atomic MPC on July 19, 2010

The Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB hard drive has great specifications and performs well too. However the value proposition seems doubtful since it addresses neither the "performance at any cost" niche nor the "give me low-cost storage" markets....

By PCWorld India on July 15, 2010

100

The pack of "VelociRaptors" First appearing as the Raptor, these 10,000 rpm WD drives became VelociRaptors as of the 150 GB version (WD1500HLFS). The 300 GB WD3000HLFS has the same tech spec as that one. The HLFS' have 16 MB of cache memory...

By DigitalVersus on July 07, 2010

Western Digital's answer to SSD speed is its spinning platter hero, the VelociRaptor, and now it's got capacity too with 600GBs of storage space.Want storage performance though? Get an SSD.Sounds simple, but there is a snag. Solid state drives...

By TechRadar on July 06, 2010

Affordable SSDs and hybrid hard drives steal some of its thunder, but this drive packs tons of speedy storage and impressive write speeds for far less than similar-capacity SSDs....

By Computer Shopper on July 01, 2010

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