Although they were detailed yesterday, Western Digital has officially launched its new VR200M VelociRaptors hard drives. Despite the fact that these 450GB and 600GB new VelociRaptors are quite an upgrade when compared to the previous generation, SSDs still retain the performance throne.

The new VR200M VelociRaptors are still designed as a 2.5-inch drives with an optional 3.5-inch heatsink. WD has simply increased the platter density and has doubled the buffer size to 32MB.

The rest of the specs include 0.4ms track to track seek, 8.5ms full stroke seek, transfer rate/buffer to disk of 145MB/s, 32MB buffer size, rotation speed of 10,000RPM and SATA 6Gbps interface. The aforementioned support for SATA 6Gbps interface that is kinda useless as there is no performance benefit. In fact, according to some reviews that are online, it is actually slower than 3Gbps SATA in some cases.

Most reviews agree on same facts. With US $329 and US $299 price tags for the 600 and 450GB drives, and its performance gains of up to 5 to 10 percent for average user, these new VelociRaptors fit somewhere between the regular HDDs and pricey solid state drives.

- AnandTech
- HotHardware
- TheTechReport
- PCPerspective