Introduction

It's no secret that Western Digital's enterprise flagship enthusiast drive has lost a lot of market share to solid state drives. Before consumer SSDs became popular, every enthusiast on the planet was rocking a 10,000 RPM Raptor.

It wasn't uncommon to find several in power user's systems in RAID arrays. When the 300GB model launch I had eight in my main computer, drives that I still have and are still running strong today. Testimonies like that are all over the internet and go to show the longevity this series of products are capable of. When you talk to your grandfather or even your father you might hear them say, "They don't make them like that anymore", well Western Digital still do.

The new Western Digital VelociRaptor might be slower compared to the latest crop of SSDs, but it still has a lot going for it. The first is it's based on proven technology. When was the last time you had to flash your mechanical HDDs firmware just to keep it from blue screening? Users that keep a lot of data on their boot drive also favor spinners because they offer much more capacity over equally priced SSDs. The cost per GB of space is much lower, even for a flagship VelociRaptor drive.

Western Digital recently launched three new models that make up the latest generation of VelociRaptors. The capacity sizes are 250GB, 500GB and the first 1TB model to take on this namesake. All three models use 10,000 RPM platters and that is what gives this family low latency.

Today we're looking at the largest model in the family, the 1TB model.