Conclusion
Well this review has actually been quite fun, The new hard drive from Western Digital has been put through the tests and it’s results shown to use in great detail. The only information that I will part to you is that this is NOT an SSD and no one should have expected anywhere near the results of an SSD. Mechanical Hard drives will never perform as well as an SSD and that is a physical limitation and will never change. The truth is that hard drives only get faster with density and speed(RPM) changes.
Now with that being said, the Velociraptor performs amazingly(in hdd terms). The hard drive performs better than the stated specs by Western Digital. This is without question the fastest hard drive you could ever have and it also does it with a decent size of 1TB but also comes with other lower sizes.
The general use for this hard drive is still a little tricky as anyone who wishes to have faster loading times for both start-up and applications is going to want to get and SSD as they are unbeatable in that regard, but what you have to remember is that SSD’s are limited aswell. while sure you can get say 120GB for a decent price in SSD terms(Around €140), that is just little over 10% the size of this hard drive and it will fill up quickly.
This is where Western Digital on the Velociraptor series are again going to make their mark, If you have a need for speed(Pun intended) and need a lot of storage space for those files than the only option will be the Velociraptor. This doesn’t come as a shock as while it will only be certain people with these needs. Anyone who wishes to have a load times cut down on games will know what I’m talking about and understand that installing a game on an SSD will use up the limited space extremely quickly and especially certain games that take up to around 10GB-20GB a piece. The Velociraptor is perfect in this regard as it will give you much faster loading times then conventional hard drives but still have the capacity of up to 1TB which is one-third of the highest available hard drive available.
So what I’m really trying to say is that if you are just on the look for sheer speed and performance then an SSD is the only option, but if you want decent performance and a lot more storage for decent money. Then the Velociraptor is the best choice and in fact the only choice in this regard. There is also the option of having a small SSD as a cache drive and using the velociraptor as the main drive and that gives you the pretty much the best of both worlds in terms of start-up times for both say Windows and your most used applications.
The velociraptor would have gotten a silver award if it wasn’t for the fact that is the only HDD to perform this good, the fact there is no competition in this regard means only one thing. Gold award all over the place
That’s pretty much it at the end of the day. The Velociraptor is the fastest mechanical hard drive available and while it costs around €330 give or take depending where you buy it, this is actually quite impressive as with the hard drive spike still in effect, you could pay around €90-100 for a 1TB green drive. This would mean not even half the performance of the Velociraptor. Also the fact there is no competition for the performance this hard drive will give. Western Digital have done a great job keeping the price down on this.
I will commend Western Digital here as with the costs of SSD’s coming down it was a bold move to release 200MB/s hard drive but there is no doubt a need for such a thing as it stands more people still buy hard drives than SSD’s because, well let’s face it, files are getting bigger and not smaller. Games, music and videos and photos. SSD’s aren’t in a place to compete with capacity.
Again, I will reiterate, if you are on the look out for sheer performance and are not concerned about capacity then an SSD is the best and pretty much only option. If you are looking for just high-capacity for storing basic files like videos and such, then a normal green hard drive is all you need. The Velociraptor is for those that wish to have a fast hard drive and still have a big capacity for more storage needs like gamers and those larger files in general.
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