Western Digital VelociRaptor 10,000RPM Hard Disk in RAID 0

VelociRaptor Compatibility

From the side we see the VelociRaptor uses standard screw spacing on their bracket.

When I first started testing the new VelociRaptor, I noticed right from the word go that the drive in current form would not play well in most NAS servers, or for that matter any system that uses a backplane on a 3.5 inch drive system.

It was only after my first review was completed, but prior to publishing that a press release arrived in my inbox stating yet another VelociRaptor variety; this version with an updated bracket that places the drives connectors in the proper place. I am glad to see that Western Digital quickly identified this small problem and just as quickly started to issue a fix. We all know that in this industry small compatibility problems are discovered and fixes sometimes take months to be worked out, but that was not the case here.

Here we see (from lowest to highest) a standard 3.5 inch SATA hard drive, VelociRaptor and 2.5 inch SAS drive. You can see that with the bracket the VelociRaptor with the standard bracket will not slide into a backplane. On the other end of the scale, a bare 2.5 inch drive, or a drive removed from the bracket will fit in 2.5 inch drive bay like those found in Enhance Technology's QuadraPack Q14, a 5.25 inch hot swap drive carrier that fits in a standard CD/DVD ROM bay and holds four 2.5 inch drives.

As a hard drive aficionado, I know what I and many of you wanted to see. The one thing that has been void of all of the previous VelociRaptor reviews published thus far; RAID 0 results!