Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB review

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Verdict:

Review Date: 19 Mar 2009

Price when reviewed: £220

Buy it now for: £143
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.kikatek.com

Reviewed By: Ben Pitt

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The VelociRaptor's 300GB capacity is tiny, but nothing else comes close to matching its 10,000rpm spin speed or 4.2ms seek time.

Unlike the 3?in Raptor disks that it replaces, this is a 2½in drive. However, Western Digital states that it's not designed for use in laptops, presumably because of its power consumption and consequent heat generation. It's available as a bare drive (part number WD3000BLFS) but the model we tested is mounted in a heatsink that doubles as a 2½in-to-3½in adaptor.

The drive broke records in our large-file performance tests, although Samsung's F1 DT 1TB was only around three per cent slower. Both Samsung F1 models were faster at writing small files, and four disks in this test were faster at reading them.

With a price of £220, this disk is over nine times more expensive per gigabyte than our best buy, and not really any faster.

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