Western Digital VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX hard drive

The newest WD VelociRaptor offers 600GB of storage as well as a 10,000rpm spin

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The latest addition to Western Digital’s VelociRaptor range doubles the storage capacity of the previous model and adds a SATA III interface. The new WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX 6 Gb/s SATA stands out as a heavyweight hard drive for high-end gaming and multimedia PCs. It boasts 600GB of storage, a 10,000rpm spin speed, 32 MB cache and agile transfer speeds within a small 3.5inch frame.

Pros

  • Excellent file transfer speeds, 600GB capacity, 10,000 RPM spin speed

Cons

  • It's not the quietest hard drive on the market

Bottom Line

The WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX is a blistering fast hard drive that will suit high-end gaming rigs and multimedia PCs. At 600GB, it also provides reasonable bang for your buck.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 399.00 (AUD)

Special Offers

Western Digital promises a 15 per cent increase in performance over the last rendition of the VelociRaptor (the VelociRaptor WD3000BLFS). With an RRP of just $399 (66 cents per formatted gigabyte), WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX is a good buy for anyone looking to push their computer to its limit.

While some larger capacity hard drives offer more gigs for your buck, the extra cents here go toward speeding up the disk, achieving read and write speeds of over 100 megabytes per second in some cases.

We conducted two file transfer tests with the drive while connected to a testbed running a 300GB WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor drive. The first test consisted of 3GB worth of 1MB files, which simulates installing applications and backing up system files. In the second test we use a 20GB folder of 3-4GB files; this is more akin to dealing with high-definition movies.

Here is how the results compared to other hard drives on the market:

Small File (3GB) Transfer Test Results
Model Price Storage Capacity Memory
type		 Read
speed (MBps)		 Write
speed (MBps)		 Read/write
speed (MBps)
WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX $399 600GB SLC 47.6 69.8 50.8
Solidata K6-32 SSD $199 32GB MLC 46.9 38.9 25.4
Apacer A7 Turbo SSD $309 64GB MLC 50 36.1 37.5
Solidata K5-32 SSD $359 32GB SLC 50.6 34.1 26.8
Kingston SSDNow V+ SSD $445 64GB MLC 49.2 50 56.6
Kingston SSDNow M Series $855 80GB MLC 49.2 50 56.6
Intel X25-M SSD N/A 80GB MLC 49.2 49.2 66.7

Large File (20GB) Transfer Test Results
Model Price Storage Capacity Memory
type		 Read
speed (MBps)		 Write
speed (MBps)		 Read/write
speed (MBps)
WD VelociRaptor WD6000HLHX $399 600GB SLC 102.1 78.5 53.4
Solidata K6-32 SSD $199 32GB MLC 35.9 71.1 24.8
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 HDD $217 500GB Hard drive 85.99 77.2 25.63
Apacer A7 Turbo SSD $309 64GB MLC 77.9 64.7 68.3
Solidata K5-32 SSD $359 32GB SLC 76.9 42.4 37.1
Kingston SSDNow V+ SSD $445 64GB MLC 76.6 77.29 75.2
Kingston SSDNow M Series $855 80GB MLC 73.09 71.04 52.49
Intel X25-M SSD N/A 80GB MLC 76.1 74 87.8

The unit itself is a small 2.5 inches, though is housed by a 3.5 inch heat sink that’ll keep the device running cool in long and high-intensity computing sessions. While it’ll stay cool, it won’t stay quiet. While transferring on and off the drive, the unit was noticeably noisy, with its spinning parts sounding more like a computer case fan; it's louder than the previous VelociRaptor hard drive. Evidently, this is a by-product of packing double the storage capacity into the same size unit. As a high speed drive, the best performance is harnessed when packed into a high-end PC with other drives that run at 10,000rpm rather than the more common 7200rpm.

The VelociRaptor series are typically expensive compared to other, larger hard drives, but the latest version bridges the price gap by offering double the capacity, halving the per gigabyte price. Even the smaller capacity VelociRaptors were unparalleled for high-speed computing, so the extra 300GB on top is simply improving on an already high-end product.

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Read more on these topics: storage, WD, hard drives, western digital

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