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

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.

The most common solution to this problem is to store huge applications and games on a hard drive, and reserve the SSD for the OS and whatever else is most important. But what if you have games that stand to gain a benefit by being run off of an SSD? In an age where new games can require 15GB+ of space, purchasing a small SSD is just sometimes not a great option.

This is a problem Western Digital aims to remedy with its just-released 1TB VelociRaptor. This latest generation promises to be 25% faster than the last, and in some cases it even has the potential to surpass SSD performance. Internal tests at the company show that the latest VR drive hits a score of about 8800 in PCMark Vantage’s hard drive suite, versus 7500 that the last-gen 600GB VR could achieve.

According to Iometer, the latest drive proves 45% faster where sequential reads are concerned, and 9% faster for random reads. The domination then continues with a thumbnail generation test, which completed in about 19 seconds on the new VR drive, and 24s on a competitor’s 120GB SSD. This, despite the fact that SSDs have far better IOPS performance.

Like previous VelociRaptor drives, this one is clocked at 10,000RPM. It features a 6Gbit/s connection, and is speced at 200MB/s throughput. In addition to a 1TB model being made available, so are 500GB and 250GB models, for a bit of extra selection. All drives feature the same underlying technology that makes this generation faster than the last.

We have yet to receive the drive, thanks to a certain shipping company holding the package for ransom, so as soon as we’re able, we’ll post our look at the drive. For those who want to jump on it right away, you can expect to pay about $299 for the 1TB model.