Home > Consumer Reviews > Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB Bulk/OEM Hard Drive 2.5 Inch, 16 MB Cache, 10,000 RPM SATA II WD3000GLFS

There is no other speed improvement investment you can make on your computer that will have a more significant effect on speed than a fast hard drive. Faster video card? Nope. More memory? Nope. Faster CPU? Nope. I have done them all.

For home use, us hacks are forced to use mainstream parts because of costs. SCSI is the fastest alternative to SATA and EIDE drives. But, an Adaptec SCSI card costs about $300+ and the hard drive can cost $300 to $500 depending on size. SCSI hard drives for that reason are always smaller in capacity and most are under 100GB. I'm in engineering and my work computers have always been SCSI. But, you can make any dog computer rock by upgrading to SCSI if you have a big wallet.

This WD Velociraptor hard drive is the in between choice. It is not as fast as SCSI but close, and it is much faster than the standard hard drives. Compared to the 120GB SATA hard drive I replaced, I can notice a huge improvement for programs to load. If I had to guess I would say the speed is about double or a little more. Based on the specs for a 12msec standard hard drive, these are in the 5 to 6 msec range. Not bad for a $200 300GB hard drive. Some have complained about the cost per GB being high, but if you look at the cost per GB per second of the Velociraptor, it is the cheapest available on the planet. And remember, speed upgrades are not linear relative to costs. To get this close to SCSI speeds for this size hard drive I could spend $1000 in the SCSI world. I am impressed with this hard drive.

For those out there who might be hesitant because of the difficulty factor on how to transfer your current data onto the new hard drive, WD has created software which will do this whole change process for you with about 3 clicks of the mouse. The software called Data Lifeguard Tools comes on a CD with every retail version. This version sold here is the OEM version and has no software. But, you can download the tools for free from the WD website. All I had to do was add the new hard drive to my system and the software recognized it even though it was not partitioned or formated. It asked if you want to transfer everything from your boot drive to the new drive and that was it. After it finishes which takes several hours, you shutdown and take the old one out and you're done. Very easy process.

Replaced my 150GB Raptor with this VelociRaptor and an immediate change was noted. Very fast. Very impressive.

Want the fastest desktop hard drive available? Get this drive.

Enough said.

First off, this is not listed as an OEM product, but it is in fact OEM. That means that it does not come with any supporting documentation, SATA cables, power cables, or retail packaging. Its very frustrating that Amazon has neglected to list this as "OEM." I don't have a problem buying OEM, I do it all the time as I've got a large supply of left over computer parts and always have things like SATA cables lying around. However, for the 'average joe,' expecting a retail package, the way this item is listed could be very misleading. Usually OEM parts are listed that way in their title. This one isn't.

Evaluating a hard drive is fairly easy; does it do what it is supposed to do? Is it reliable? In this case, the answer is yes, and maybe. The drive works fine, is lightning fast, and performs as expected. My Vista boot time dropped about 20 seconds when booting from this drive, which is pretty impressive.

However, when cloning my current Seagate 500gb drive to this one, I found very many bad sectors on the drive. I've uploaded a photo to support this. There were so many that I was ultimately forced to do a 'ignore all' just to get the cloning finished. That many bad sectors on a brand new drive is really annoying and simply not acceptable. I'll be returning the drive for a replacement, and will update this review once it's been received.

In concussion, this is a fast drive. It is OEM and not listed as such. I experienced a whole lot of bad sectors when cloning from my old drive. I have no choice but to leave this a drive a pretty poor review. Your mileage may vary, and if you get one of these with no bad sectors, you will likely love this drive.

I only use western digital hard drives. I have done so for the past 10+ years. I also build my own computers.

In the past I've only used 7200rpm drives and found them to be sufficient. I finally made the plunge into 10000rpm drives, when WD offered a decent memory size. The hard drive runs quiet and stays pretty cool.

I use this for my operating system and to game. Stick with 7200rpm drives for storage...at least until the price/gb drops on 10000rpm drives.

I was eager because spending as much money, or more, for a 32GB SSD drive is dumb. (And people complain about the Velociraptor being pricey!) And I like performance; every review I read said this thing flies like a budgie on amphetamines. And, yes, it runs relentlessly fast. STABLE too. Vista loads in half the time and EVERYTHING is far more responsive.

I was hesitant because others reported the unit dying after x number of days. On my system, the drive was instantly found, cloning software worked without a hitch, and a full chkdsk scan revealed 0 sector failures. Time will tell and I might post a follow-up review. Others have mentioned bad sectors or the drive dying after x number of days/weeks. Mine was manufactured on June 8 2008, if that date helps anybody.

I was also eager to spend, because I don't want to go through the hassle of making a RAID 0 array; knowing if one drive fails I lose the whole array. Most reviews show this drive, on average, on par with RAID 0 if not better. Rather less time consuming to put in too...

Also, why only 16MB of cache for this puppy? I can think of reasons for and against keeping only 16MB, so I won't complain too much... :)