Western Digital is releasing today two SATA-600 versions of their 10,000 rpm VelociRaptor hard disk drive, one with 450 GB and another with 600 GB. Let’s see how the 600 GB model (a.k.a. WD6000HLHX) performs.

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Figure 1: Western Digital VelociRaptor 600 GB (WD6000HLHX).

It is very important to notice that the two new hard drives being released today are targeted to the enterprise segment, i.e., servers. This means they have higher reliability numbers compared to desktop parts.

Like the previous VelociRaptor, the new models are 2.5” hard disk drives that come installed inside a 3.5” adapter that doubles as heatsink, as you can see in Figure 1. Internally the reviewed unit has three 200 GB platters, 32 MB cache and is controlled by a dual-core processor.

The 450 GB model has 879,097,968 sectors, which translates into 450,098,159,616 bytes of storage or 429 GiB. The 600 GB model has 1,172,123,568 sectors, which translates into 600,127,2668,16 bytes of storage space or 558 GiB. Read our Hard Disk Drives Capacity Limits tutorial for further information on this subject.

The 450 GB model is arriving with a USD 299 suggested price tag, while the 600 GB model comes with a USD 329 suggested price.

We decided to compare the new SATA-600 VelociRaptor with the previous 300 GB incarnation, with a 1 TB desktop hard disk drive (Caviar Black) and with a 128 GB solid state drive (SSD), all from Western Digital. In the table below we compare the basic specs from these products.

All prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review, except for the reviewed drive, which we are publishing the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Prices at on-line stores are usually lower than the manufacturer’s suggested price.