Western Digital Releases 1TB VelociRaptor; 25% Faster than Last-Gen

[Rob Williams]

By now, the benefits that an SSD can bring to a computer are hardly unknown, but we still haven't reached a point where everyone is ready to equip their PC with one. When talking to potential buyers, the most common complaint I hear relates to the lack of storage space - a real concern for those who love having lots of games installed. Just the other day, someone told me they refuse to go below 240GB, but that at the current time, such drives still don't fit their budget.

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Psi*]

Nice. Similar to the copper versus fiber (network connectivity) war. $300 is more than I would pay for my application. But I do like the simplicity ... and the performance.

 

[Rob Williams]

Nice. Similar to the copper versus fiber (network connectivity) war. $300 is more than I would pay for my application. But I do like the simplicity ... and the performance.

The reason this is dubbed as a "workstation" drive is because it's best-suited for heavier applications, on par with the same ones you would run, or video editing and that sort of thing. $300 for 1TB is a lot cheaper than what you could match on the SSD side, and since the performance is much better than traditional hard drives - even RAID-esque ones - then there could be a huge market for this.

For those who want even better performance, WD has told us that when two of these are used in RAID, the performance is closer to 2x than what was possible with previous drives.

For a gamer, I think this drive would be an amazing addition to a system because it would allow a LOT of games to be installed on a high-speed device, while the OS and apps are left to an actual SSD. I'm tempted to pick up one for my personal rig to use it for just such a configuration.

 

[Psi*]

I am listening and interested in the RAID benchmarks when available.

 

[Rob Williams]

Will see what I can do. Won't be for a while though as I'm moving in the next week or so and don't have a good Raid controller on hand (not sure if I need one, though).

 

[Kayden]

This might be what I want for my Steam drive, be better then getting a SSD just for games. Price perGB is much more reasonable here.

EDIT: BTW Damn that company (the one that shall not be named) and you for that matter, for making me wait on the TG review! (c;

 

[Rob Williams]

I am sooo anxious to begin using a VR 1TB for a Steam drive, just to go long-term with it and see how it compares to the standard 7200 RPM 500GB all my games have been on for a while. I especially want to follow-up to this test I did with Lineage II:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUGPVFcElkI