Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Reviewed

Packaging
The packaging that we received the drive in was very simplistic as it was OEM packaging and not a retail box, so from our experience if you were to order an OEM directly from WD you should receive a product that is properly packaged against the abuses that UPS or FedEx may put it through. Other than that, there’s not much else to say about the packaging or accessories since this is OEM and we will likely skip straight to the meat of the review.



Performance and User Experience
Setup:
Intel Xeon X3350 (Q9450 Equivalent) CPU
4GB of Kingston HyperX 1066 DDR2 Ram (Provided by Kingston)
DFi LT X38 T2R Motherboard
Coolermaster Real Power Pro 850w PSU (Provided by Coolermaster)
2 x Corsair P64 MLC SSDs (Provided by Corsair)
2 x Seagate Barracuda XT HDDs (Provided by Seagate)
128GB Kingston Vseries Gen2 SSD (Provided by Kingston)
600GB Western Digital Velociraptor (Provided by Western Digital)
Note: The Seagate Barracuda XTs are SATA 6G drives, but this motherboard is not capable of SATA 6G support. We may leave that for another review.



For this review, we wanted to pit the Velociraptor against some similarly and not-so similarly priced SSDs and HDD solutions as listed above. These included HDDs and SSDs in RAID as well as those not in RAID arrays. We also wanted to make sure that there was quite a bit of real world experience as well. This means that along with running the typical hard drive benchmark programs, we also ran some real world tests to evaluate usability and performance.