Just before the dawn of the SSD, each and every system relied on hard drives for their storage and if you wanted that bit more from your drive, Western Digital’s Raptor drives were the way to go with their 10,000RPM spindle speeds and extremely fast seek and access time to go with. As soon as the SSD markets started to open however, the hard drive market soon took a hit with those who would have before gone for the Raptor now seeking the higher speed potential that was on offer from the motionless drives.

Moving more towards now, SSDs dominate the market and given the performance from some of the drives that we’ve looked at recently, they have come one heck of a way in that time. Their major flaw however is capacity; this is just one thing that in respect of a mechanical drive that they cannot offer, at least not in an affordable sense. This is where hard drives pick up the line again and hence why they still have a huge impact in the technology world. Getting this balance between speed and capacity has been a recent topic of interest and consequently we’ve seen an array of caching and hybrid drives that are put together to give a balance between the two. The Raptors and now the VelociRaptors are now back in contention at this point with their high spindle speeds, faster transfer speeds and lower latency and crucially, larger capacity.

To keep up with the growing SSD trend, Western Digital needed to make a stand and so we see the VelociRaptor making a huge comeback with its SATA 6Gbps interface, 64MB cache and now up to 1TB of capacity in a 2.5″ form factor. Hopefully the new VelociRaptor has got the bite it takes to make its stand worthwhile.