A while back Western Digital launched the fastest SATA harddrive on the planet in the form of the VelociRaptor. Even though the harddrive boosts a storage capacity of 300GB and a rotational speed of 10,000RPM, WD was able to fit it all inside of a 2.5″ case. The result was a small, but extremely fast harddrive which outperformed all other SATA harddrives, even the 3.5″ models. Those who wanted more could always put two of them together in a RAID configuration and raise the bar, which is just what they did over at HotHardware.
They took three VelociRaptors and created a RAID 5 array of 600GB. RAID 5 doesn’t just offer improved performance but also redundancy as the third drive is used to store backup data. Despite that, the RAID5 array displayed tremendous performance with a burst speed of 598.2 MB/s. Although, what’s most impressive is the average speed of 209.4MB/s, which is about 33% better than what a WD1500 Raptor array can do.
VelociRaptor RAID 5 in HD Tach – courtesy of HotHardware
