Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

Installed four of these drives into my new 12-core Mac Pro mid-2010, configured as Raid-5 using the Mac RAID card. XBench scored 313 and performance is solid throughout. Although these devices are SATA 6GB/s, they worked flawlessly in my 3GB/s RAID configuration.

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.

Installed without a hitch, runs silently, and can load worlds (Skyrim, WoW, etc.) on the fly. I would say its better than a SSD for gaming use. Now it's gonna be difficult to ever use anything else.

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

I normally build servers with SAS 15K drives, however for small user count servers with cost a consideration, these SATA 10K enterprise drives provide an acceptable solution. Thanks to WD

This hdd is very fast and for all technology updates its very awesome first class product.My windows 7 now boots faster than before iam very please thanks.

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

I have 2 of these in RAID 0, on the EVGA Classified SR-2 motherboard. The SATA III controller on my motherboard is about as functional as a football bat, so I have them on the SATA II controller. They are fast, and reliable. I haven't bought into the SSD craze yet, so I can't compare them to SSD's, but they seem fast. So far, they're solid as a rock, and I've had some pretty interesting things happen with my build. I'm deployed in Afghanistan, and I built my system over here. After about 2 months of the finest dust and sand, that gets into everything, and just the generally tech unfriendly environment here, these drives haven't even hiccuped. They are kind of pricey, but I'm glad I got them. I should also mention that I'm very loyal to WD for hard drives. In the 10 or so years that I've been building and seriously using computers, I've always used WD drives, and I've never had one fail on me. The only problem I ever had with a WD drive, was last week, when I got a my last 2TB for this system, the plastic "L" shaped piece around the SATA connector was partially broken, and when I tried to ignore it and plug it in anyways, it broke all the way off. I e-mailed amazon and had an RMA in minutes, I just received the replacement drive and slapped it in. One thing to note though, if you are going to use RAID 0, no matter how reliable your drive/raid controller, if you have any data that you don't want to lose, back your system up. That way if your raid/drive dies you can just restore (either to a single disc if you don't have a spare, until you can replace it; or just slap in your spare and restore from your backup). I have a full system backup, so I never worry about my raid failing or drive dying. That and WD drives have always treated me well. I highly recommend this drive.

This is my first 10,000 rpm drive and I was looking for speed without the expense and problems of an SSD drive (2 ssd's died a fast death.) This drive is fast but is very noisy. You will know every disk access as you get plenty of noise. Bootup sounds like its making popcorn. Yes, its defraged..... But overall, I'm happy. I got what I wanted (faster boot time,) and so far, no problems. Would buy another 10k drive, but may look at one that does not make popcorn while saving my data.