Hard Drive

For our hard drive, we wanted to combine performance with capacity and efficiency—that led us to a Western Digital Velociraptor, a 300GB 10K RPM SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive that offers a slew of features helping to make the drive fast, quiet and green. The Velociraptor is a 2.5-inch drive that is installed in a special 3.5-inch housing, which is designed to dissipate heat and reduce noise.

Western Digital calls the mounting arrangement (or heat sink) an IcePack. The drive's 300GB capacity comes from a pair of 150GB platters spinning at 10K rpm within the drive mechanism.  Four heads access the platters, and because the platters spin so quickly and are physically smaller than standard 3.5-inch drives, the Velociraptor is able to access and transfer data much more quickly than competing offerings.  Previous tests with Simpli Software's HD Tach shows Burst Rate performance of 255.8MB per second, almost double the throughput of Western Digital's previous generation of Raptor drives.

With a street price of around $280, the drive consumes about 40 percent less power during use than previous-generation hard drives.