These days, "fast hard drive" seems like an oxymoron. Compared with solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash memory and controller chips to achieve astounding read, write, and boot speeds, traditional mechanical media is increasingly looking like a relic ready to be put out to pasture. It's odd, then, to see a major release of a new spinning hard drive, yet that's exactly what Western Digital has done with its VelociRaptor line. These new models in the trusty family, ranging in capacity from 250GB to 1TB, promise outstanding performance for their class, and they deliver it. For that reason the VelociRaptor earns our Editors' Choice award—but whether it should earn your dollars is a more complicated question.

Because, ultimately, it's money that makes the best argument for a VelociRaptor over an SSD. As of this writing, the 1TB VelociRaptor has a list price of $299.99, or approximately 30 cents per gigabyte of storage space. PCMag's Editors' Choice for medium-capacity SSDs, last generation's 240GB OCZ Vertex 3, costs about $189.99, or 79 cents per gigabyte—and you only get about one-quarter the space. If you want to buy a single 1TB SSD, you'll have to sacrifice around $2,299.99 for the OCZ Octane, or almost $2.30 per gigabyte. When it comes to SSDs, you have to practice moderation unless you're sitting on a trust fund; with even top-of-the-line hard drives, there are not equivalent restrictions.

For users who seek a sensible balance between price and performance, it's difficult to do better than the VelociRaptor. These drives combine a 10,000rpm drive with 64MB of cache and the 6Gbps SATA III interface for three obvious speed boosts. A fourth comes from the fact that the actual drive mechanism is of the 2.5-inch variety, couched in a 3.5-inch heat sink–like shell, which improves disk access and cooling to keep everything running smoothly. It might be more mundane than SSD technology, but it's the hard drive taken to its furthest imaginable (at least for now) extent.

And the speed increases you experience with a VelociRaptor are tangible. A standard 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black—a solid drive on its own terms—returned sequential read and write rates of 143.5MBps and 138.7MBps on our CrystalDiskMark test. The 1TB VelociRaptor managed 213.9MBps and 208.8MBps. On the 4KB version of the same test, the Caviar Black pulled 0.718MBps read and 1.251MBps write, compared with 1.089MBps and 3.683MBps for the VelociRaptor. Running the secondary storage test on Futuremark PCMark 7, the Caviar Black earned a score of 2,219 to the VelociRaptor's 2,759. Yes, the VelociRaptor costs about three times as much as the Caviar Black, but there's no denying it has earned pride of place in Western Digital's lineup—and probably in your desktop, too.

That said, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out exactly how poorly the VelociRaptor stacks up to an SSD. We ran the 240GB Vertex 3 through the same tests on the same system and saw 484.4MBps and 305.8MBps (sequential read and write, respectively), 30.37MBps and 65.20MBps (4KB read and write, respectively), and a PCMark 7 score of 5,384. Forget asking how the two kinds of drives compare—they simply don't.

Is the 1TB Western Digital VelociRaptor a terrific hard drive? Absolutely. But ultimately it is still a hard drive, and suffers from the natural limitations of that decades-old technology. We can wholeheartedly recommend this drive if you're watching every penny, if you're looking to add a lot of zippy storage without going broke, or if you're trying to up performance on your secondary drives and believe (most likely correctly) that using an SSD would be wasteful. But if you're just setting up a standard boot partition for your desktop, an SSD will do even more for you—and a mid-capacity model like the 240GB Vertex 3 marshals more than enough space to do the job. We're glad that Western Digital created and has maintained the VelociRaptor line over the last several years, and that it's put out a new drive as satisfying as this one. But how much longer these types of drives will be reasonable additions to anyone's system remains to be seen.

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