Hard drives from western digital speak for itself in every aspect. Every product released by western digital had some advantageous features that clearly distinguish it from its previous products. The Western Digital’s VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS is such unique drive that marked the launch of first 10,000-rpm drive. All standard and performance drive usually has drive speed of 7,200-rpm. But, this drive outsmarted all other drives in performance, which were present at that time. Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS became the number one drive for its performance after its launch clearly leading all other drives in all aspects.
WD VelociRaptor 300GB
The VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS from western digital exhibited only strengths in all fields when it was put for performance test. This drive set new records in hard drive performance and it exceeded previous results of other competitors. One of the most impressive results obtained during performance test is the writing time of the VelociRaptor. It took just 89seconds to write files and folders of 3.06GB size. The previous best performance in writing was given by Western Digital’s Caviar SE 16 with 750GB capacity, taking 121seconds to copy the same sized files and folders. It was found that the VelociRaptor has about 26% improvement from his counterpart.
Specification of the Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS:
This 300GB capacity drive has a SATA latching connecting provision for SATA 3GB/s interface. It has met the requirements of RoHS for emitting lower levels of noise and non-hazardous working environment. It has an average latency of 5.5ms and a buffer of 16MB. Sustained data transfer of 120MB/s and buffer to host data transfer rate of 3GB/s can be seen in this drive. Drive gets ready within 7.0seconds on average and takes maximum of 10.0seconds. It has a rotational speed of 10,000rpm. Seek time for read is 4.2ms and for write is 4.7ms. It has load and unload cycle of minimum of 50,000. This fantastic drive comes with a limited warranty of 5 years.
Advantages of Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS:
The main advantage of this hard drive is that is performs 35% faster than its previous products. This increase in performance is due to the increase in the rotational speed of the drive, which reaches a maximum of 10,000rpm along with 16MB cache and a SATA 3GB/s interface. The main objective of this drive is to support gaming systems and systems with higher storage capacity. However, WD official say that this hard drive is suitable for enterprise applications as the Mean Time Before Failure of this drive is 1.4Million hours. This makes the drive more reliable among its rivals.
Western Digital launched this drive as a 2.5” VelociRaptor, different from other 3.5” usual hard drives. The reason behind this design is that the 2.5” drive is placed inside an Ice Pack Mounting Frame, which will suit in the 3.5” drive space of the system. The purpose of Ice Pack Mounting Frame is to reduce the heat generated during the operation. The heat generated will be high as high the disk works at higher rpm levels. When the drives are used in the multi-drive chassis or in any vibration prone zones the Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward technology optimizes the performance and operation of the drive. Secure Park ensures that the recording head does not make any contact with the surface of the disk during spin up, spin down and even during the switch off mode, which in turn results in the higher reliability and higher protection of the hard drive. The cost of this drive starts from 299$. This makes the drive to cost $1 per GB of data stored in the drive.