Customer Reviews

Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM SATA II WD3000GLFS

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There is no other speed improvement investment you can make on your computer that will have a more significant effect on speed than a fast hard drive. Faster video card? Nope. More memory? Nope. Faster CPU? Nope. I have done them all.

For home use, us hacks are forced to use mainstream parts because of costs. SCSI is the fastest alternative to SATA and EIDE drives. But, an Adaptec SCSI card costs about $300+ and the hard drive can cost $300 to $500 depending on size. SCSI hard drives for that reason are always smaller in capacity and most are under 100GB. I'm in engineering and my work computers have always been SCSI. But, you can make any dog computer rock by upgrading to SCSI if you have a big wallet.

This WD Velociraptor hard drive is the in between choice. It is not as fast as SCSI but close, and it is much faster than the standard hard drives. Compared to the 120GB SATA hard drive I replaced, I can notice a huge improvement for programs to load. If I had to guess I would say the speed is about double or a little more. Based on the specs for a 12msec standard hard drive, these are in the 5 to 6 msec range. Not bad for a $200 300GB hard drive. Some have complained about the cost per GB being high, but if you look at the cost per GB per second of the Velociraptor, it is the cheapest available on the planet. And remember, speed upgrades are not linear relative to costs. To get this close to SCSI speeds for this size hard drive I could spend $1000 in the SCSI world. I am impressed with this hard drive.

For those out there who might be hesitant because of the difficulty factor on how to transfer your current data onto the new hard drive, WD has created software which will do this whole change process for you with about 3 clicks of the mouse. The software called Data Lifeguard Tools comes on a CD with every retail version. This version sold here is the OEM version and has no software. But, you can download the tools for free from the WD website. All I had to do was add the new hard drive to my system and the software recognized it even though it was not partitioned or formated. It asked if you want to transfer everything from your boot drive to the new drive and that was it. After it finishes which takes several hours, you shutdown and take the old one out and you're done. Very easy process.

Replaced my 150GB Raptor with this VelociRaptor and an immediate change was noted. Very fast. Very impressive.

Want the fastest desktop hard drive available? Get this drive.

Enough said.

First off, this is not listed as an OEM product, but it is in fact OEM. That means that it does not come with any supporting documentation, SATA cables, power cables, or retail packaging. Its very frustrating that Amazon has neglected to list this as "OEM." I don't have a problem buying OEM, I do it all the time as I've got a large supply of left over computer parts and always have things like SATA cables lying around. However, for the 'average joe,' expecting a retail package, the way this item is listed could be very misleading. Usually OEM parts are listed that way in their title. This one isn't.

Evaluating a hard drive is fairly easy; does it do what it is supposed to do? Is it reliable? In this case, the answer is yes, and maybe. The drive works fine, is lightning fast, and performs as expected. My Vista boot time dropped about 20 seconds when booting from this drive, which is pretty impressive.

However, when cloning my current Seagate 500gb drive to this one, I found very many bad sectors on the drive. I've uploaded a photo to support this. There were so many that I was ultimately forced to do a 'ignore all' just to get the cloning finished. That many bad sectors on a brand new drive is really annoying and simply not acceptable. I'll be returning the drive for a replacement, and will update this review once it's been received.

In concussion, this is a fast drive. It is OEM and not listed as such. I experienced a whole lot of bad sectors when cloning from my old drive. I have no choice but to leave this a drive a pretty poor review. Your mileage may vary, and if you get one of these with no bad sectors, you will likely love this drive.

I only use western digital hard drives. I have done so for the past 10+ years. I also build my own computers.

In the past I've only used 7200rpm drives and found them to be sufficient. I finally made the plunge into 10000rpm drives, when WD offered a decent memory size. The hard drive runs quiet and stays pretty cool.

I use this for my operating system and to game. Stick with 7200rpm drives for storage...at least until the price/gb drops on 10000rpm drives.

I was eager because spending as much money, or more, for a 32GB SSD drive is dumb. (And people complain about the Velociraptor being pricey!) And I like performance; every review I read said this thing flies like a budgie on amphetamines. And, yes, it runs relentlessly fast. STABLE too. Vista loads in half the time and EVERYTHING is far more responsive.

I was hesitant because others reported the unit dying after x number of days. On my system, the drive was instantly found, cloning software worked without a hitch, and a full chkdsk scan revealed 0 sector failures. Time will tell and I might post a follow-up review. Others have mentioned bad sectors or the drive dying after x number of days/weeks. Mine was manufactured on June 8 2008, if that date helps anybody.

I was also eager to spend, because I don't want to go through the hassle of making a RAID 0 array; knowing if one drive fails I lose the whole array. Most reviews show this drive, on average, on par with RAID 0 if not better. Rather less time consuming to put in too...

Also, why only 16MB of cache for this puppy? I can think of reasons for and against keeping only 16MB, so I won't complain too much... :)

The Western Digital 10KRPM Velociraptor hard drive series is the fastest non-solid state drives out there. There are no funky drivers or software or connectors or cables or anything: the drive plugged in just like a standard SATA drive, bolted to my PC's chassis just like any hard drive, and was whizzing away at 10,000 revolutions per minute as soon as I hit the power switch.

I wish I had benchmarked my system before and after to compare the true impact of the drive: I do notice an improvement while playing games and working in MS Office, but the change isn't Earth-shattering.

The fact that Amazon sells the OEM version but advertises it without letting on is a little devious - luckily the price difference between Amazon and the other guys makes it worth it: just be sure you have the SATA cables and mounting hardware before you buy! And don't expect a manual or CD of software or, well, anything other than an awesome harddrive and plastic packaging.

Downside - It took 6 drives to get 4 that worked. I haven't checked for any bad sectors yet but expect to find some.

Upside - They are lightning fast, much quieter and cooler when compared to the previous 150/160 GB versions. The 150/160GB versions sounded like a machine gun during heavy duty operation and ran hot. Mine are set up in 2 2 disk Raid 0 arrays, one array for the OS and Apps, the other for data. 5 year warranty will cover any hardware failure. I had a 150GB drive fail. WD replaced it without a problem.

Recommendation(s) - If you need the speed (flight simulation, video editing, etc.), do it. I use nightly automatic backup anyway because of the Raid 0 configuration. Given the reliability issues I would back up nightly in any configuration, including Raid 5. Turn off prefetch/Superfetch and indexing unless you really need it. Make sure you have adequate cooling. Keep an eye on the SMART info that is available through Speedfan or similar hardware monitoring programs. I received plenty of warning my 150 GB was failing. I'd be amazed if you don't see a significant difference in heavy duty data access applications.

First, there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this drive. Regarding the position of the SATA connectors; this is a 2.5" form factor drive in a 3.5" aluminum cooling bezel for convenient use in most desktop computers. Look at the product picture and you can see this. If you need to use a drive in a docking situation where location matters, don't buy this drive.

This is the OEM version of the drive. The retail box version sells at significantly higher price. This means a warehouse worker will re-package the drive from a bulk shipping container into an anti-static bag. Mistakes can happen and it's also not really the proper way to ship hard drives, so if you want the retail box version pay the extra $50 and get it. If you roll the dice and take a chance to save the $50 then suck it up if you have to return a DOA drive once in a while.

This drive is fast and performance costs money. It is also very energy efficient and quiet when compared to the fastest 3.5" drives. I have owned every one of the WD Raptor series starting with the original 35GB and most recently the 150GB and every one of them carried a stiff price premium. All have served well in my high utilization business environment. This latest revision is the best of the bunch by a significant margin. The combination of access time, transfer rate, (finally) NCQ, and low heat and noise dissipation make this drive a very reasonable bargain for those that actually need it. It's not designed to win the $/GB prize. Write times actually beat Intel's X-25 SSD (solid state drive). If you need the performance, this is the drive.

This is the fastest non-enterprise drive I've ever used. It benchmarks twice as fast as the stock 320GB 7200rpm drive that came in my Mac Pro. The only thing keeping it from getting 5 stars is that the SATA/Power plugs aren't in the standard spot so some modification to the computer is required to get it working with hot swap/drive sleds. WD has apparently addressed this problem in a new revision. Get that version if you have sleds/hot swap. Also, this drive is very quiet for a 10K drive. The only sound I hear from it is when the heads are accessing something.

EXPENSIVE AND PRONE TO FAILURE. Known firmware problems result in drive failure in 49.7 days of usage. WD recommends a cold power down of the computers containing the drive every 30 to 45 days. The issue results from problems in the TLER and FIS firmware programing. The error occurs when someone is reading or writing to on the 49.7th day of operation. The result is all drives fail simultaneously during a data read or write resulting in total RAID failure and data corruption.

Know bad VelociRaptor drives:

WD3000BLFS-01YBU0

WD1500BLFS-01YBU0

WD740BLFS-01YBU0

WD3000HLFS-01G6U0

WD1500HLFS-01G6U0

WD740HLFS-01G6U0

WD has been very slow to replace these drives probably due to the overwhelming number of failures. We were back ordered on RMAs for weeks with downed servers. WD has been poor to recall known defective WD3000 drives and replace them. Also WD has not alerted Systems Integrators and VARs to the problem.