The new "Heavyweight Hard drive Champion of the World" is, [1] Western Digital’s Velociraptor 300GB 10K drive. This is a much needed drive since the 150GB Raptor X. Every drive manufacturer out there started to go after the Raptor X but WD never really responded. Well I can speak from first hand knowledge, this drive is awesome and fast.

Before I tested this drive the, fastest drive I had tested was [2] Samsung’s HD103UJ 1TB drive. I understand that these two drives cannot be compared side by side or spec by spec but the only test we ran was speed. The WD drive is only 300GB, but it is selling for about $299 which is the same price as the 150GB Raptor.

So the drive is fast but one other very cool feature is the size of the drive, 2.5". Plus we cannot complain about the price either. The drive is currently selling for $299.99 over at [3] Newegg.com.

Single Drive Test Results

HDTach Burst (MB/s) - 255.1
HDTach Random Access (ms) - 7.1
HDTach Average Read (MB/s) - 104.6
HDTach Average Write (MB/s) - 96.7
PCMark05 Overall - 9457

RAID Test Results

HDTach Burst (MB/s) - 229.9
HDTach Random Access (ms) - 7.2
HDTach Average Read (MB/s) - 100.8
HDTach Average Write (MB/s) - 93.5
PCMark05 Overall - 8471

The one thing that folks need to understand is that this drive is not built to placed in a laptop. This is a desktop or server drive only. The power requirements would trash a laptop.

Of course if you are looking for storage and not speed, then the Samsung is still the top dog.