The Velociraptor was on my list for my next gaming rig build before this article, and afterwards, it's staying there. :-)

What is this "VR150" you keep referring to? There's no reference of that name anywhere from WD, just the WD3000GFLS. The only instance of it on their site is in the list of reviews. VR150 isn't even a useful designation, since it doesn't indicate the capacity (presumably it refers to one platter).

As an ex raptor owner, still too little, too late, too slow.
If this baby cost 120$ US sure no problems I'd consider one but it's just not fast enough.

I can't stand slow hard drives but I also can't stand paying so much money for such a little improvement, hard disks make me sad :( such an annoying technology when it comes to computer performance.

Don't get me wrong, it's fantastic to see a new form factor and experimentation as well as performance increases but it's simply not enough for me, I want to see articles discussing us reading at 500mb a second, writing at 300mb a second and access times of less than a millisecoond, unrealistic yes but damnit if a computer might finally 'feel snappy' with a drive like that in it.

I owned RAID 0 36gb raptors as well as the 74gb model and the time saved and performance increase was just not worth it in the long run, not when you can buy massive drives with huge platters for similar money, slap an extra 2gb of ram in, put your swap file on a second physical disk and attain the majority of the boost the raptor would have got you with substantially more space.
I <3 hard disks but I also hate hard disks :(

4TB superfast SSD's under 400$ US - where art thou?

From what I read with my untrained eye, it looks like the WD Caviar 640gb is the overall best option amongst this group of hard drives. jmo

And heat output can't be good as well. There's a reason that this drive has a huge heatsink attached to it that has more surface area than the drive itself.

my hdd buying is at an end. my 1.5 tb is more than enough space for pr0n stuff. long live ssd! and chances are, it will be from a reputable memory maker.

"Even so, the production VelociRaptor still has a two-second lead over its closest rival."

a whole 2 seconds! can you imagine what you can do in those 2 seconds? really, i have no idea, please do tell.

The Raptors place in the sun will be short lived, check out the performance from the latest SSDs such as the Mobi 3000.

Raptor dynasty is officially over in the enthusiast ring. There is no point in getting them unless you are building a real server or workstation that needs as low as random access speed as possible.

Any modern 7200 HDD will work fine for better GB/$$$$ ratio.

To make Raptor's fate more solid is that cheaper, faster SSD are looming over horizon posed to render all fast-RPM HDDs obsolete.

The MTRON SSD is 20x more expensive on a per-GB comparison, and it's only about twice as fast as the Raptor. Of course, there are other, much faster SSDs like the FusionIO but they cost even more.

Would be nice if you compared to any other 10k disk. I know they are twice the price, but the Savvio 10k is comparable. According to StorageReview the WD beats the pants off a Savvio 10k.1, but we're up to 10k.3 now and it's probably faster.

Nice graphs, Geoff. Thanks guys for listening to reader feedback.

Western Digital has managed to shave a couple of seconds off the VelociRaptor's boot time, which remains the fastest of the lot.

According to the chart the above statement isn't true.

A 150GB Velociraptor at 1/2 the price (not likely given the pricing of 3.5" Raptors of varying platter count) would be much more compelling to me. It would have enough capacity for an OS/app drive but not feel as wasteful in absolute dollar terms. SSDs are coming on strong but it will be a few years before they're near reasonable in terms of capacity.

Having said that I recently got a 6400AAKS for a main system drive and will partition it, the ttoal storage space doesn't really matter to me with a separate server for storage. I've had Raptors before and they are very nice but not 'as nice' any more, $300 is too much for one drive.

Now if western digital will put the drive on a diet so I can cram one in my laptop i will be really happy. If my ages old raptor 74 dies I know what drive I will be picking up.