High Performance Hard DriveThe bare drive features a high performance 10000RPM hard drive with a total capacity of 150GB so you can store your movies, music, applications and documents for easy sharing with your friends and even back up your system.
SATA 3.0 Gb/s InterfaceThe 3.5” SATA internal notebook hard drive features the next-generation SATA II interface supporting up to 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rates, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and hot-pluggable point-to-point connections for optimum performance, efficiency, convenience and flexibility.
Learn more about the Western Digital WD1500HLFS
Model
Brand
Western Digital
Series
WD VelociRaptor
Model
WD1500HLFS
Packaging
Bare Drive
Performance
Interface
SATA 3.0Gb/s
Capacity
150GB
RPM
10000 RPM
Cache
16MB
Average Seek Time
4.2ms
Average Write Time
4.7ms
Average Latency
3ms (nominal)
Features
Features
IcePack mounting frame: the 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is enclosed in a backplane-ready 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink.
Pros: the fastest sata2 drive currently available on the market
Cons: We have discovered a very serious issue that everyone needs to be aware of. We found that after running almost 50 days continuously the drive will throw Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) errors. These errors will cause a RAID volume to fail. This issue occurs when TLER is enabled
When the continuous power on hours hits 49.7 days, an internal firmware time keeper, in the drives firmware wraps. When this time keeper wraps, any active Read, Write, and Flush commands will prematurely TLER timeout. Because this time keeper wraps on all of the VelociRaptor, installed in a system together, at the same time (all powered on at the same time), any RAID volumes on these drives will fail. In our testing, our system RAID volume failed and we were not able to recovery because all of the VelociRaptor failed together. Data is not lost but the RAID controller will think that all of the drives failed because of the incorrect TLER timeout. If the system, with VelociRaptor drives, stays powered on,
Overall Review: it will fail again every 49.7 days.
We have also been told by Western Digital that a short term work around is to power cycle any systems with the VelociRaptor drives every 30-45 days to avoid the internal firmware time keeper from wrapping at 50 days. A simple reset or restart doesn't work. The system must be completely power off to reset the internal firmware time keeper. Western Digital is also currently working on a fix and should have something soon to resolve the issue.
Pros: Fast drive, once u go WD u dont go back, however ive never had anything else due to the fact that WD has never failed me yet.
Cons: I dont believe the performance outweighs the price and while these 10k rpm drives are ok solo, they really shine in a RAID 0 setup
Overall Review: And to the moron below me who claims that it is not a 2.5" drive look again, the actual drive itself is a 2.5" and the heatsink housing has several purposes one being it acts as an adapter so that it fits in a 3.5" bay. Long story short u shouldnt write a review if you dont know what you are talking about.
From someone who actually bought it!!!4/25/2010 11:27:42 PM
Pros: Fast, i have 2 on RAID0, and I get 176.2 on Seq/read and 174.1 seq/write, this is running the onboard raid on mb, this is SSD territory gonna test on Areca ARC 1110 and see if these could go alot faster, for desktop these are good enough don't need no SSD, I game so SSD don't apply to me, i've own the 74GB Raptors and it ran for 6 years without missing a beat, awesome drives, it's a bit heavier though than these, performance is not too far off. If you're looking for an upgrade for your desktop hd then you should consider these, WD has one of the best warranty in the business, I've never experience any problems with their support. That's just me though, you decide for yourself.
Cons: No cons!!! Probably getting 2 more and do RAID5 on my Areca
Overall Review: the guy below who thinks these are garbage, don't be an Intel SSD fanboy, I have the X25-M for my wifes' laptop and I dont see no difference in performance that I should be excited about, you never bought these at newegg or never owned these, stop making assumptions until you actually owned one, reviewers like you make people nervous on making a purchase!!
VERY Fast with the right SATA Controller!12/19/2009 1:44:43 PM
Pros: I'll get to the meat:
Intel G41/ICH7 SATA:
Avg : 138.3 mb/s
Seek : 3.01ms
Burst : 144.4 mb/s
Using 3rd party PCI-X Controller:
Avg : 188.1 mb/s
Seak : 2.77ms
Burst : 191.7 mb/s
NOTE: This is in RAID 0. And with the 3rd party controller that's darn near SSD speed! Those are READ speeds only.
Compared to WD Black it's faster but not by much. 16mb cache is all you need as the drive is capable of spewing out whatever very quickly. I don't see how more cache would help, a faster controller DID though! Maybe it would.... Dunno.
Heat? What heat? These stayed VERY cool! 93*F to be exact. No fans on the drives.
Cons: Price per GB. SSD drives keep dropping in price and we'll have a good race here.
Overall Review: Need to make them bigger for desktop systems. These drives are designed for Entry Level servers or high demand power users. YOU NEED the right SATA controller to extract the most performance. I've used these rarely in smaller 5-25 user database servers and they fit the bill. SAS drives exceed these by nearly double the speed but they and the controller would cost 10x's more.
They do make a 2.5" model... 16mm deck height. It FITS the MacMINI!!! Not this one though. You could drill out the rivits but just get the right one for the job.
Best if used for budget Database Server or High End Gamer with CORRECTLY matched SATA Controller.
Pros: Quick loading times, applications load a lot faster.
Very quiet.
Cons: Obviously the price/storage ratio isn't that great, but this drive should not be bought for the storage space.
Overall Review: Many people with this drive claim to have install times of Windows to be 12 minutes, 10 minutes, or less. I don't believe it -- maybe if they factored out the entire first half of the installation while Windows is copying over files and doing all it's preliminary stuff. My box took about 25 minutes to install XP from start to finish. It's not slow by any means -- it's paired with an E8400 @ 3.6, which is a beast as far as raw processing power.
You get what you pay for, and that is a small, but noticeable performance gain. It will be fast, but probably not as quick as you think based upon most of the exaggerated reviews here.
After running HDtune, I found it was roughly 20% faster than my WD 750 GB 7200 rpm hdd.
So the question you need to ask yourself is if a small performance gain is worth the premium you pay.
Anonymous
Ownership: less than 1 day
Verified Owner
VelociRaptor is F.F.9/11/2008 11:34:57 PM
Pros: Noticeably faster than the WD1500ADFD it replaced
Cons: Might be too loud for some (chirps)
Overall Review: This drive is quick, it is a bit loud but I kinda like it, sounds like bird chirps.
Anonymous
Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
Verified Owner
WOW!1/4/2010 8:05:59 PM
Pros: These things are fast! I just got two of them and they are twice as fast as my current hard drive using RAID 0! I can install applications very quickly and windows 7 32bit took no time at all to install (except for the dvd drive lag).
Cons: Price per Gb is still very high, but worth the cost.
Overall Review: I had these on my desk when running the HD Tune software. They got hot but not burning when I ran the read and write tests, but came down quickly in temp once the tests were done. Here are the results I got from the tests:
HD Tune Pro: NVIDIA STRIPE 279.47G Benchmark
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 75.5 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 223.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 181.5 MB/sec
Access Time : 7.0 ms
Burst Rate : 173.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 16.5%
HD Tune Pro: NVIDIA STRIPE 279.47G Benchmark
Write transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 80.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 219.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 173.5 MB/sec
Access Time : 7.0 ms
Burst Rate : 173.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 14.3%
Pros: Fast. Run cool. Definitely a performance boost from 7,200 RPM drives, and even older Raptors.
Cons: None noticed so far.
Overall Review: I've got a couple of these setup in RAID0 for my new system. I had debated whether to go with these or an SSD setup and opted for these. I felt that the SSD's would need to come down in price before I joined the bandwagon.
Some people might be turned off by the price / gigabyte ratio, but these are performance drives!
Definitely happy with the purchase.
Pros: the fastest sata2 drive currently available on the market
Cons: We have discovered a very serious issue that everyone needs to be aware of. We found that after running almost 50 days continuously the drive will throw Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) errors. These errors will cause a RAID volume to fail. This issue occurs when TLER is enabled When the continuous power on hours hits 49.7 days, an internal firmware time keeper, in the drives firmware wraps. When this time keeper wraps, any active Read, Write, and Flush commands will prematurely TLER timeout. Because this time keeper wraps on all of the VelociRaptor, installed in a system together, at the same time (all powered on at the same time), any RAID volumes on these drives will fail. In our testing, our system RAID volume failed and we were not able to recovery because all of the VelociRaptor failed together. Data is not lost but the RAID controller will think that all of the drives failed because of the incorrect TLER timeout. If the system, with VelociRaptor drives, stays powered on,
Overall Review: it will fail again every 49.7 days. We have also been told by Western Digital that a short term work around is to power cycle any systems with the VelociRaptor drives every 30-45 days to avoid the internal firmware time keeper from wrapping at 50 days. A simple reset or restart doesn't work. The system must be completely power off to reset the internal firmware time keeper. Western Digital is also currently working on a fix and should have something soon to resolve the issue.