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WESTERN DIGITAL
VELOCIRAPTOR 300GB
$300, http://www.wdc.comROUND 1
SPEED
Hard drive speed isn’t the
most important factor to
consider when build-
ing your dream PC, but
there’s no denying that a
faster hard drive equals
better performance. The
10,000rpm WD Velocirap-
tor is the fastest consumer
hard drive on the market
(excluding SSDs), reach-
ing burst read speeds of
249MB/s in HD Tach, with
average reads hovering
around 108MB/s. While
the 7,200rpm Barracuda’s
burst speeds are 20 percent
slower than the Velocirap-
tor’s, the former manages
to eke out average reads of
104MB/s, and its average
write speeds are actually
about 3 percent faster than
the Velociraptor’s. The Ve-
lociraptor’s random-access
speed, though, was twice
that of the Barracuda’s in
our tests.
WINNER: VELOCIRAPTORROUND 2
CAPACITY
The Raptor line has always
favored performance over
capacity; 2003’s model had
a scant 36GB of storage.
And while you still won’t
buy a Velociraptor for its
size, the latest model of-
fers a respectable 300GB of
storage—enough for your
operating system and quite
a few movies and games.
Nevertheless, the
Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB
drive has this category
locked up. Not only does
its capacity trounce the
Velociraptor’s by a factor
of five, but it’s also half
again the size of the tera-
byte drives that are its
closest competitors.
WINNER: BARRACUDAWestern Digital Velociraptor
vs. Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB
T
he age-old dilemma: speed or capacity? In the days of yore,
men spoke in whispers of enterprise drives, which married
the two, but lesser mortals had to choose between large amounts
of storage and speedy access to data. The gap, at least within
the realm of standard hard drives, is narrowing—today’s high-capacity drives often have read times that are within spitting
distance of the speediest consumer drives, a title Western Digi-
tal’s Raptor line has held for years. This month, we pit Seagate’s
1.5-terabyte Barracuda against this generation’s 300GB Western
Digital Velociraptor. – N A T H A N E D W A R D SQUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALL