Western Digital VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX

Face it, it’s hard to get excited over hard drives. That is, until one becomes the bottleneck in your video-streaming server or gaming machine. I’m always subjected to far longer load-screens than I’d like; while I’d love to go for the insanely high speeds of an SSD, it’s beyond my budget given the size of my game library.

Western Digital’s 600GB VelociRaptor drive is a nice alternative – though nowhere near SSD performance, its 10,000RPM speed and 32MB cache make it a high performer among hard drives. Directly connected to our Project Beast machine, I observed a maximum write speed of 61MBytes/s (average 55MBytes/s), and a maximum read speed of 133MBytes/s (average 124MBytes/s). These speeds significantly outgunned both Project Beast’s own high-spec hard drive (itself an older Western Digital model), and the drive in my own Project Giles gaming machine.

The VelociRaptor brand claims to meet “mission-critical”, “enterprise-class” standards with a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.4 million hours. That’s just shy of 160 years of operation. Unfortunately we lack the technology (or a spare century-and-a-half) to put this to the test, but it’s certainly an impressive claim.