Western Digital recently sent us its latest-generation VelociRaptor, a 1 TB update to what was already the fastest 3.5" disk drive available. Once again, it stymies the mechanical competition with significantly higher performance.
Western Digital wrote a chapter in storage history back in 2003 when it introduced the first Raptor. A 3.5” hard disk, it looked a lot like any competitor's disk, except for a small, performance-enhancing difference: the 37 GB WD360GD was the first consumer hard drive to spin at 10 000 RPM, a speed previously only available on expensive enterprise-class hard disks designed for the SCSI interface. But instead of SCSI (or even the then-ubiquitous IDE interface) Western Digital's Raptor employed a SATA interface, another of the company's bold moves.
The Raptor's innards were unconventional as well. Once you got under its hood, you found an IDE interface. SATA was achieved through a Marvell-based IDE-to-SATA bridge. Fortunately, the bridge chip did not noticeably limit the disk’s SCSI-like performance. Western Digital's WD360GD was put to use in applications where I/O performance mattered, like video editing. Its price, while steep, was still significantly lower than comparable enterprise SCSI-based drives. The rest, as they say, is history.
From Raptor to VelociRaptor
In 2008, the VelociRaptor succeeded three generations of Raptors. It maintained its 10 000 RPM spindle speed, but traded 3.5” platters for 2.5” ones, while keeping a external 3.5” form factor serving as passive cooling. The IDE-to-SATA bridge chip had been dropped back in the Raptor's second generation, so naturally the VelociRaptor employed a native SATA interface.
As SCSI became obsolete, the cool-running and power-friendly (relatively, of course) VelociRaptor model found more ideal environments, from performance-oriented desktop PCs up to business-class workstations and small business servers.
Then, 2010, Western Digital doubled the VelociRaptor's capacity to 600 GB and its interface bandwidth to 6 Gb/s. But would the company continue the family in the face of mounting competition from notably faster SSDs?
Yes, it turns out. Western Digital recently launched an updated generation of VelociRaptors, which we started testing as soon as they landed in our German lab. The highest-end model sports a capacity of 1000 GB, and the manufacturer claims a performance improvement of 25% over its already-speedy predecessor. Older VelociRaptors had no problem outclassing other SATA-based disks, earning the family a reputation as the fastest on the desktop. Needless to say, our expectations for the WD1000DHTZ are quite high.
- Western Digital's Sixth-Generation Raptor
- The VelociRaptor WD1000DHTZ (1 TB)
- Technical Data And Test Configuration
- Benchmark Results: Sequential Data Rate And Interface Bandwidth
- Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Read/Write Performance And Streaming Read/Write Performance
- Benchmark Results: Access Time And I/O Performance
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Application Performance
- Temperature And Power Consumption
- Undeniably Fast, But Is It Right For You?

Even on a standalone basis, for me Seagate 3TB at $145 and 85-90% of Raptor's performance makes more sense that Raptor 1TB at $300.
WD is living in a fools' world if they think that the premium they are charging on normal hard disks (because of `shortages') will be extendable to Raptor.
I completely agree that for people like us, an SSD+cheap storage drive is the way to go, but i don't think we're the target market.
If you're a pro into a lot of content creation, be it video or 3D animation/rendering stuff, this IS the drive for you, IMO. I mean, you could pair up a 256GB SSD as your OS+productivity suit drive, with a few of these drives for the actual work. Would save a lot of time and money, plus be low on power consumption. Power consumption is a bonus for RAID configs.
Seriously, find me an affordable 1TB SSD that you can RAID?
No, the raptor is actually quite a bit further ahead than that, especially in random i/o, where it has as much as a 2x performance lead on the 3/4TB Barracuda XT's. Even in sequential reads/writes (generally the performance strong point of 7200RPM drives) it still has around a 50% performance advantage.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5729/western-digital-velociraptor-1tb-wd1000dhtz-review/2
Even on a standalone basis, for me Seagate 3TB at $145 and 85-90% of Raptor's performance makes more sense that Raptor 1TB at $300.
WD is living in a fools' world if they think that the premium they are charging on normal hard disks (because of `shortages') will be extendable to Raptor.
What would be its temperature if you'd have done it ?
Could it fit into a performance desktop replacement notebook like a M18x or a Clevo mobile workstation ?
Yes, its a fast drive. It is most likely the last Raptor to ever be made. For video work, a typical 5400~7200RPM 2~3TB HD will do just fine. Can buy two 2TB drives + a 120Gb SSD for a tad bit more money... and still have a much quieter running system.
The market for these drives has certainly shrunk in the past few years, and I doubt many enthusiasts and gamers would even consider buying one anymore. It's value is limited to those who need more performance out of their storage devices than your typical 7200RPM 3.5" drive can deliver. Production pros working with large volumes of high res assets and complex project files would probably see the most benefit from a drive like this.
If you're doing something where you specifically need 1TB of data accessible quickly all the time, this may have a niche, but it's a VERY SMALL niche. Almost everyone would find better performance paring a 240GB SSD with a 1TB HDD, using up 60GB on Intel's SRT, and 180GB for the SSD to be used as usual (Windows, programs, +60GB for projects/scratch).
Considering the 256GB Vertex 4 is at $165 and the 256GB M4 hits $150, I'm just completely puzzled by Western Digital throwing money into developing such a device.
No, the raptor is actually quite a bit further ahead than that, especially in random i/o, where it has as much as a 2x performance lead on the 3/4TB Barracuda XT's. Even in sequential reads/writes (generally the performance strong point of 7200RPM drives) it still has around a 50% performance advantage.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5729/western-digital-velociraptor-1tb-wd1000dhtz-review/2
I completely agree that for people like us, an SSD+cheap storage drive is the way to go, but i don't think we're the target market.
If you're a pro into a lot of content creation, be it video or 3D animation/rendering stuff, this IS the drive for you, IMO. I mean, you could pair up a 256GB SSD as your OS+productivity suit drive, with a few of these drives for the actual work. Would save a lot of time and money, plus be low on power consumption. Power consumption is a bonus for RAID configs.
Seriously, find me an affordable 1TB SSD that you can RAID?
This drive is much more reliable than any SSD out there. And will absolutely be magical if you put them in a large RAID array if you need tons of space on fast disks. Yes you can put 8x 240GB SSDs in RAID, but that will give you just under 2Tb of space (RAID0) and performance bottlenecked by the RAID controller.
I for one will use these in a NAS that requires large storage space used by multiple users.
For most people, a SSD/HDD combination will work much better and and those who need fast and large storage in a laptop can't use this anyway (this is where hybrid drives shine).
Rendering boxes don't need fast hard disks, they read data and save their frames over the network to your workstation or server.
"We measured the minimum sequential write performance of the new VelociRaptor at 114 MB/s, which can be an absolutely critical number in applications that rely on fast write performance, like digital recording of multiple high-definition video streams."
uncompressed 10-bit YUV (4:2:2 video):
1280x720 @ 60p - 141 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 24PsF - 127 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 60i - 158 MB/s
uncompressed RGB (4:4:4 video):
1280x720 @ 60p - 211 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 24PsF - 190 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 60i - 237MB/s
These drives are still not enough to write one stream of uncompressed HD, much less multiple streams.
no, not even close. the 50gb ssd only cashes 50gb, the raptor is more for storage needs, and large storage/scratch disc at a budget price (a comparable ssd size wise would cost 1000$ or 600 if you are willing to raid 0 4 bargan deal 256 drives.)
the 50gb cashe is great for normal users, but people who would use a VelociRaptor are not normal.
you would want it as a boot, trust me when i say that moving my boot off a hdd make that hdd close to 1000 times more responsive, take into account my hdd was hammered so hard that it wasn't even getting 1mb a second at times. now its back into the 90-120 range where it should be.
at the same time, i could argue for getting a quad channel motherboard fill it with 8gb ram sticks, get 8-16 gb set aside for system memory, the other 48-56gb as a ram disc and a pci ssd for a secondary scratch disc and run off storage.
we are talking a professional level though, not a popular youtube or podcast level.
same here, i just cant see the use in this... well i can see the use, but its not THAT much faster than other hdds anymore, they use to be blazeingly fast, i remember quake 3 arena took a long time to load on a standard hdd back in the day, than the screensavers showed us a 10krpm drive load it, and it was night and day difference, i mean right now, looking at the load times of hdd compared to an ssd, that impressive, but back in the day, a 5krpm or a 7krpm compared to the 10krpm... my god... the load difference was even greater than what we see with ssds today, and let me prefface that with what we SEE, yea i know they are many MANY times faster, but loading a level in a game is where most people can see the difference.
but today, there isnt even much of a difference between a 7200 rpm over a 10krpm.
good point, and if the thing finds and gets crap done faster, it may come out as using less overall energy.
if you look for deals, you could get a 1tb raid of 250gb drives, or at least in that range, and you would get about 2000 read and write from that, not sure of the io bonuses, but i assume that it would be there. and having that in a raid 5 i believe for redundancy, would out preform most of what you want.
if i remember correctly, star wars star destroyer, in the new movies, was either 1tb or 1pb (i believe it was tb) for the fully modeled version, i forget which. so unless you are working with bigger more detailed models, or working with completely raw footage, my 700$ solution would be so significantly better than the that there would be little reason to even consider the VelociRaptor as an option.
so WD, you should put the VelociRaptor in the enterprise market, just not we would want a SAS version