The VelociRaptors

The Western Digital VelociRaptor is an amazingly fast hard disk drive. Targeted at the blade server and enthusiast markets, this Serial ATA hard disk drive not only delivers incredibly fast seek times and throughput, it also does it in a compact 2.5" form factor. For more information on the Western Digital VelociRaptor, read this comprehensive review.

Western Digital offers three versions of the VelociRaptor - BLFS, HLFS and GLFS. The BLFS is the compact form of the VelociRaptor, designed to fit 2.5" mounts. However, it will not fit into notebook drive bays because it's much thicker than 2.5" hard disk drives.



BLFS

HLFS

GLFS

The HLFS and GLFS models, on the other hand, are designed to fit into 3.5" drive bays. The 2.5" VelociRaptor hard drive is enclosed within a 3.5" IcePack™ mounting frame that doubles as a heatsink to keep the drive cool. The HLFS's mounting frame is backplane-ready while the GLFS's mounting frame is not.

Both the BLFS and the HLFS are available in storage capacities of 150 GB or 300 GB, but the GLFS model is only available with a storage capacity of 300 GB at this point in time. Irrespective of the model, the 150 GB drives use a single platter with two read/write heads while the 300 GB drives have two platters and four read/write heads.

Performance Difference?

The choice of models available made us wonder if there is any performance difference between the different models, so we decided to test it out. We had earlier reviewed the BLFS model but Chai bought a HLFS model so we thought it was a great opportunity to compare the performance of the two models.

According to Mike Goh of Western Digital, both these models should be identical, with the same firmware revision. However, nothing beats actually testing them out to see if there are any performance differences between the two models. Let's take a look.

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