Oh... if only I had the money... *dreams*

No doubt an impressive drive, but I'm having trouble getting worked up about hard disks when I see reviews for SSDs with sustained 120 MB/s transfer rates and essentially zero latency. They're expensive, and they have issues with small random writes, but these problems are rapidly disappearing. I'd be very surprised to see a new version of the Raptor after this one.

Relative to my 74 GB Raptor, the extra capacity means little to me. I have Windows and programs on that drive, segregated from the rest of my data that lives on a RAID array. A full install of XP and all the programs I've ever used takes about 15 GB; as an OS drive, the new Raptor is far beyond my needs. And as a data drive, it's too small. The only advantage is in latency, and I'd wager that the people who truly care about that use 15K SAS drives or SSDs. For lack of a compelling reason to buy this drive, I don't see the point.

I'd venture to that that's one point of view. SSDs that can compete effectively with the VR would start at around a grand -- maybe higher -- and have much lower capacity. Your Raptor 74GB is way louder than this one and double the power. Those are two pretty strong points for the VR. Random access is the area where spinning disks cannot compete against SSDs... but you're really looking at over a grand with say 60GB capacity to get that plus >100mb/s rates. $300 for the VR is going to look pretty good for a lot of people.

I've owned the Raptor 150 and to be honest I was not that impressed with it and sold it for a Samsung 320 GB. These Raptor drives might produce really nice HD Tach benchmarks but I question the benefits for most users. The benchmarks that show things like game load times puts the Raptor only a few seconds or so ahead of 7200 RPM drives.

Very nice review, was looking forward to it before I made the decision to buy one.

Great review, thanks MikeC.

One big question that im sure many people are still wondering though. Is there ANY way to fit this in a Scythe 2.5" Quiet Drive since its a bit thicker than your standard notebook drive? Perhaps by leaving out one of the 2x included thermal pads.

This drive will definately be the next drive i buy.

It's nice to get confirmation on the "heatsink" part. 2.5" 10kRPM drives has been a dream of mine for many years and now they can even be made with ample storage room. I hope that this has a chance of starting a small trend since as long as it's alone out there it'll remain just too expensive.

I can't argue the value side, except to say that it seems like a very niche product. In my case, my Raptor is suspended within an Antec Solo and below the noise floor of my apartment. It's completely inaudible. Justifying a $300 outlay for a 5W power drop in a system that draws 150W would require some pretty specious reasoning.

Having handled Thermalright's prototype 2.5"-to-3.5" adapter/heatsink, I am looking forward to its availability so that I may get this HD and "shove it in some corner without any airflow or conduction to the chassis".

Alan Hsu

I can see this drive being an important development for a wide range of professional/semi-pro users. This is incredible performance/value for video editing, digital photos, and software development. These applications will honestly benefit from the combination of capacity and sustained speed in the way that gamers THINK they'll benefit.

I'm too cheap to get one, myself, and I just live with my slower budget 3.5" drives. My OS "drive" is RAM...much faster than any hard drive, but VERY small. Still, if I had $300 to spend I'd rather buy 8gigs of RAM and a new mobo/CPU to take it.

Well, the modern 7200rpm hard disks thrash the old Raptor both in benchmarks, as in real use, except only for seek times. It was a performer when introduced, but that's a long time ago (in PC technology terms). The VR does the thrashing against modern 7200rpm drives, and will probably lose that edge in time, just as the previous model did.

Can I please have a minus-one-platter version of that drive which fits notebooks? Just imagine something like an IBM X61t tablet PC with that drive. It would be photoshopping on steroids, just imagine: a tablet PC with 120MB/s sustained disk transfer rate and <8ms access time...

I'd even pay >250€ for that. WD, are you listening?

I second this request.

MIKE - Are you able to test this with the unit you have ??

Thanks

Very nice review, as always Mike. Thanks a lot.

It's nice to see that you can have have you cake and eat it when it comes to HDDs. As mexell said a laptop version would be interesting (and not too bad on the battery since it's only really 2-3W worse than most laptop HDDs).

Oh, but what to do? Get one of these or wait for SSDs to reach a reasonable price?

Third that request. I was thinking maybe just assembling the QD as usual and just not let the upper shell go all the way down over the bottom shell? And THEN suspend it in a NoVibes for 3.5" HDD drives maybe... Best of three worlds. Inherent quiet hard drive, enclosure and suspension.

Awesome drive. If I was to buy a new primary non-SSD HDD I would definitely get this one.

But as another poster said. 300 GB harddrives is a segment that is becoming less and less meaningfull for most enthusiasts. (This is an enthusiast drive). Within not too long I reckon that more and more people are going to have 0.1 ms latency SSDs for their OS drive and a larger 1+ TB harddrives as their storage units.

Very impressive drive - fast, cool and silent. And kudos to introducing a performance 2.5" HDD to desktop users.

Absolutly

I have done this and have 3 layers of drive.

1. OS drive - Mtron 16GB (but without the journaling/page/temp files on this). Ubuntu & WinXp
2. Local Data Drive - Raptor 74GB. Local stuff + OS journaling/temp directories.
3. RAID NAS - 4x500GB drives on the end of a Gigabit LAN. (Might build my own to addto/replace the Infrant ReadyNAS - a bit slow)

Oh and 4. Local RAM drive 1GB to supplement WInXp.

When the VRaptor is here in 150GB, I'll replace the 74GB.

I got one since last week and I really liked it. Index search of vista now works really well where results are pulled almost immediately. Having the VR in the lower chamber of P182 I can hear the seeks but to me they are not intrusive and I can't hear the idles over the fans.

Have you noise insulated the side panels at the level of the lower section ? Also the inside of the door ?

Nop, no damping what so ever. I will put some Acusti's into the case at the end of this year since I got some fan motor whine to hide at the upper chamber, people with very quite system to start with may hear the idle but I doubt it. The idle sound is the first to get drowned out if you have any other noise source in your case

Very nice of WD but in my opinion since you dont need a system drive to be more then 50-70gb at the most you might as well wait a year for SSDs to get below $100.

SSDs wont cost much in a year or so... reason computer stuff have crappy second hand value is because the new stuff arent getting more expensive but that the old stuff are getting priced cheaper.

I don't know about the SSD's. Intel entering may bring the price down but I don't see performance/$ arriving to acceptable levels for at least another two years. They need to get the erase block size down to the single bit level otherwise they will always get slaughtered when it comes to small file I/O.

I think hybrid drives are likely to be the key to high performance SSDs in the short term, or maybe some new kind of caching mechanism.

You can get PCI-e SAS/SATA RAID cards on eBay for peanuts now (Dell PERC5s are particularly common) and they often have 256MB or more of cache RAM. That means any write that is less than 256MB happens entirely at PCI-e 4x bus speed (~750MB/sec) and the HDD/SDD can catch up as and when. Obviously it's also very good if you actually want to use RAID functions like RAID5 too.

Write speeds are not a big issue for desktop use I think. Sure, for mass storage drives they count, but for a system drive it's mostly reading, and seek times are what really count.

It's a shame RAM drives are so expensive. An 8GB RAM drive with backup to Compact Flash or something would be both affordable and pretty much the ultimate in performance, and enough for almost any OS other than Vista.

One other area I keep my eye on is encryption. You can already get drives with hardware encryption from Hitachi and Seagate, and the hardware can sustain 300MB/sec throughput without problems. I expect we will see SSDs with hardware encryption very soon, because aside from the same security benefits as with HDDs it is also just about the only reliable way to completely erase flash memory (wipe the encryption key).

Will the Antec Solo suspension mounts securely hold the VR’s slimmer thickness?

I know the article suggests the NoVibes III and also states that, “If the Velociraptor was positioned close to the front intake vent of a standard PC or suspended there with elastic cord in a SPCR-esque silent rig, it would run perfectly cool.â€

I've just contacted Frozen CPU, the US/CA distributer for Noise Magic. They are going to order several 2.5" versions of the NoVibes. Will take about 3 weeks.

Thanks for the excellent review Mike! And, yes, WD SHOULD have contacted you!

I couldn't hear the idle noise of my 74GB Raptor but the seeks were annoying, but almost gone with AcoustiPack installed.

I forgot to mention that the Raptor is already IN a GrowUpJapan box. I've only done the bottom of the sides plus all the front door. Helps also to hide the lower chamber fan.

All I can hear now is my pocket watch ticking on its stand and the occasional ambulance/fire engine.

<offtopic> victorhortalives -- So where's Xhystos? Is it related to Victor Horta?

[quote="samdrong"]Will the Antec Solo suspension mounts securely hold the VR’s slimmer thickness?

I know the article suggests the NoVibes III and also states that, “If the Velociraptor was positioned close to the front intake vent of a standard PC or suspended there with elastic cord in a SPCR-esque silent rig, it would run perfectly cool.â€

Schuiten & Peeters : Cities of the Obscure

http://www.urbicande.be/intro/default.php?page=8&lg=en
http://www.urbicande.be/carte.php#
http://dictionary.ebbs.net/english/epages/edict_xyz.htm

For all those wondering, but too lazy too click links. Its a belgium comic book series created by Schuiten & Peeters.