Western Digital WD VelociRaptor 500GB 3.5" SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Comment:
That thing look badass and feels badass. It look very solid and screams quality. My online gripe is the exposed extention of the SATA and Power connectors but it seems well made.I'm using a Crucial M4 128 Gb as an OS drive and a Caviar Black 1 Tb. The Caviar, showing signs of his 5 years of age, I finally decided to try the famous raptor serie that I've heard about for a decade.So far I'm very pleased by this drive and it's giving pretty much what I expected. It's not a SSD by any means but it's fast, very close to half the reading speed of my Crucial M4. With 32 or 64 GB of flash, this drive would be insane.

Comment:
I used to use SSDs as the boot device in most of my workstations.After 4+ years of SSDs with a 75% re-install/failure rate, I have switched almost all of my systems to Velociraptors.Velociraptors are a much better $/GB value than SSD and almost as good for performance (synthetic benchmarks are meaningless since no one runs Windows with file caching disabled).For most people a 500GB Velociraptor is a better price-to-performance ratio at $150 vs an Intel 520 480GB SSD at $550.Spend the $400 you save on a better mobo, extra memory, and better video.For those who waste the time buying an 80-120GB SSD only to disable all Windows performance features and to pair it with a slow WD Blue 500GB to install their apps onto, a 500GB Velociraptor is a much better solution, go run everything faster.So what if you can boot 4 seconds faster on an SSD, are you booting every two minutes?With the money saved buy 16GB+ memory which increases the Windows file cache and get memory performance that leaves SSD in the dust.