Western Digital Velociraptor 600 GB SATA III 10000 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM 3.5 Inch Desktop Hard Drive - WD6000HLHX

by Western Digital

• WD6000HLHX

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B003FW9T0M
• Item model number: WD6000HLHX
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 7, 2010

Product Description

Size: 600 GB

The PC enthusiasts favorite 10,000 RPM hard drive is still the fastest, most dangerous carnivore around - now with an ultra-fast 32 MB cache and SATA 6 Gb/s interface and twice the capacity of previous generations. Killer speed - SATA 6 Gb/s interface and 32 MB cache enhance the next generation 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor making it up to 15% faster than the award-winning previous generation. Monstrous capacity - WD VelociRaptor SATA drives are available in capacities up to 600 GB, double the capacity of the previous generation. Rock-solid reliability - Designed and manufactured to mission-critical enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. With 1.4 million hours MTBF, these drives have the highest available reliability rating on a high capacity SATA drive. Ultra-cool operation - Consumes less idle power and uses similar active power as the previous generation WD VelociRaptor, while offering double the capacity and higher performance. IcePack mounting frame - The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is enclosed in a backplane-ready 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis. Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) - Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis. NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit. Environmentally conscious - In addition to being ROHS compliant, this generation of WD VelociRaptor is also a halogen-free design. 5-year limited warranty

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Impressive Performance December 7, 2010

By D. Roberts

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I bought this to try an idea I had, running a virtual machine from an external esata drive. My lenovo has a 128gb SSD drive, too small for a decent virtual setup, so I needed something external that was powerful and fast. I have been using WD Raptors in an old server for years with excellent results. So when I saw the Velociraptor and the great price on amazon I bought it to see. A great call, the performance is excellent, and it runs my VMs as if they were internal drives. Highly recommend this drive for whatever your needs are, has excellent speed and is very quiet.

33 of 41 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars great product May 2, 2011

By USrower

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

i just finished building my first computer (self taught)and i decided to add another hard drive so i got this one. this hard drive is fast and the main reason i got this drive is for video games which will allow the games to load faster. i only ran into one problem with this product (this is most likely because im still a noob). after i installed the cables and after my computer automatically installed a driver for the hard drive, i was unable to use/see the hard drive when i click on "my computer". after some research through the web this is what i found that helped me.

Hold down the Windows key on your keyboard and press R to bring up the Run window.
Type compmgmt.msc and click OK.
In the Computer Management window, click on Disk Management.
Look for the new drive in the right hand pane (it should be listed below your C: drive).
Right click anywhere on the disk and choose New Simple Volume.
Click Next.
Keep the default size setting, which will use the whole disk, and click Next.
Choose to Format the drive with the NTFS file system and use a drive letter.
Finish the wizard and allow the format to complete.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars hardware failures July 9, 2012

By Tinguran

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I purchased one of these 6 months ago and it works fine. I decied to buy 2 more to add extra space and redundancy. Both new drives died within 24hours. One drive has a mechanical issue (no longer spins up) the other seems to be a electrical issue (BIOS will not recognize the drive on known good SATA ports.) The original drive still works fine but only 1 drive out of 3 working means I will not buy a drive out of this series again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars VERY FAST, QUIET, EFFECTIVE UPGRADE May 31, 2012

By C. R. Sturtevant

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I replaced the 1TB boot-drive in my Windows 7 computer with this 600GB gem. My browser was very slow to display pages due to all the plug-ins and extensions I use. Now they literally pop up. I am also very pleased with the increase in speed with which my applications start up. It now takes 18 seconds from "Starting Windows" to the password page. It used to take around 30. Timing after the password page is rather imprecise but I get a completed desk top in about a minute from "Starting Windows" and I have years of junk on the computer.

This hard drive replacement has had a greater effect on speed than any other modifications I have made, including stepping up to a new motherboard with an i7- 2600k chip.

(It should go without saying that these results may only be obtained with a SATA III capable system board.)

The installation is a breeze if your new drive is as big or bigger than your old drive. I had to learn (the hard way) that Windows will not recover a saved drive-image from the backup drive if the new boot-drive is smaller than the old boot-drive. It doesn't matter if the used space on the old drive is smaller than the capacity of the new drive. It is a matter of the drive volume.

In order to make it work, these are the steps to take.

1. Shrink the volume of your old boot-drive (see below).
2. Now save a new image of the drive to your backup drive.
3. Create a system recovery disc. Don't skip this. The recovery disc seems to know things your system disc does not.
4. Remove the old boot drive and install the new one.
5. Boot to the recovery disc and recover the image.
6. Enjoy the results.

Shrinking the volume of a disk is one of the easiest and more user-friendly things Windows does....

1. Right click on MY COMPUTER
2. Click on MANAGE
3. Click on DISK MANAGEMENT
4. Right click on the right portion of the C drive
5. Click on SHRINK VOLUME
6. There is a slick little sliding-scale dialog box that will let you experiment with sizes before making a selection. Shoot for a volume slightly smaller than your new drive. I went for about 575GB. Everything on my boot-drive comes to less than 200GB.
7. You will finish with a block of volume at the far right showing unallocated space.
8. After your new drive is all set up, you can expand the volume to fit the new drive if you like. I left it alone. Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Fast, may require a firmware update for Intel RAID support April 13, 2012

By N. Souza

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

Pro: Fast for a platter drive. Nice casing.

Con: We had a pair and they wouldn't RAID (Intel Matrix) without a firmware update. After update they worked fine.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome November 12, 2011

By GaryOrlando

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

Love this drive.... super fast ! Short of buying a Hibrid SSD this is as fast as you can go for a reasonable price

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars More than Expected September 2, 2011

By Edward H Leon

Size Name:600 GB|Amazon Verified Purchase

I spent 10 years working as a System Engineer for a storage vendor. We sold performance, features and reliability.

Background issues
Before my purchase, I had a Windows 7 system that took 6min 8secs to boot. And this is with a defragmented disk drive. My system is configured with 6GB of memory, a Maxtor 320GB 7200 rpm hard disk and an Intel i7 CPU. I had two major problems with this system - the aforementioned start-up time and an annoyingly slow application start-up. The fact that when waking up from sleep mode the system would still need to be re-booted due to OS problems meant I did frequent boots. I was sure after reviewing performance reports that I needed faster storage.

In the past, this system was configured with a 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD (from 6/09 1/10) but it was unreliable and not earth shattering in GB capacity. However, it booted in little less than two minutes. The manufacturer said I should re-install Windows 7 after I experienced intolerable SSD driver issues. This was an effort I could not afford. Also, I didn't trust the manufacturer's solution. So the SSD now sits in my desk drawer.

Considered
SSD and VelociRaptor. Obviously, SSDs are expensive. Even the recently announced crop of SSDs are still pricey. According to the online reviewers, they have reliability issues - and that includes Intel's. SSD performance is probably not an issue for most applications I use. However, I do movie editing and THIS may be a problem for SSDs - large sequential reads and writes. For the time I used my 120GB SSD, HD 1080p movies were choppy. In fact,the Maxtor hard disk also exhibited choppy movie editing.

Solution
The VelociRaptor is terrific. It exceeded my expectations.... My boot time is now 2min 38seconds from the time I hit the power button. Applications start without any annoying delays. Editing HD movies is fine. An unexpected bonus is the drive is running cool and silent. I remember earlier 10,000 rpm drive running hot and noisy. This drive is actually 2-1/2 inches in a 3-1/2 inch enclosure. Spinning the 2-1/2 inch drive does not seem to generate noise or much heat - which is the most common cause of electronic failure.

Conclusion - highly recommended storage solution based on price, capacity and performance Read more ›