Western Digital's Raptor drives really need no introduction. WD has been at the cutting edge of consumer HDD performance for over five years now, and each iteration of drives in this range has been, to put it mildly, "bats out of hell powered by nuclear jetpacks". Exaggerations aside, these drives have at times offered performances in their particular timeframes that exceeded existing solutions by as much as a 100 percent performance jump.
The only downside to these drives is the fact that they offer much smaller capacities and are squarely aimed at the high-end performance desktop market. If you're wondering, I dedicated an entire paragraph to explaining previous Raptors just to establish the fact that the Velociraptor comes from a pedigree of drives that has no equal.
The first time I saw the Velociraptor, it was a bit of a shock. As you can see from the photo above, the drive is actually just a 2.5”drive mounted on a specially fashioned heatsink which WD simply calls 'Icepak'. This heatsink also doubles as an HDD mount and easily slips into any 3.5 inch bay. While this rules out any use of this HDD as an external drive in an eSATA casing, it nevertheless offers a significant advance in HDD cooling. WD claims the well-designed heatsink actually drops the HDD's temperature by 5-7 degrees.
Apart from the heatsink, the HDD looks like any other unit, so let’s jump into the benchmarks.
There are no comments on this article yet. 
