The Western Digital VelociRaptor is an amazingly fast hard disk drive. Targeted at the blade server and enthusiast markets, this Serial ATA hard disk drive not only delivers incredibly fast seek times and throughput, it also does it in a compact 2.5" form factor. Western Digital offers three versions of the VelociRaptor - BLFS, HLFS and GLFS. The choice of models available made us wonder if there is any performance difference between the different models, so we decided to test it out. We had earlier reviewed the BLFS model but Chai bought a HLFS model so we thought it was a great opportunity to compare the performance of the two models. Link : A Tale Of Two VelociRaptors
minor difference only. I don't think WD is making anymore of GLFS, they just realize their stupidity creating a enterprise sata drive that doesn't fit into backplane ... The stupidity is just not as worse as Seagate using Samsung drive in thier freeagent ..
Hehe.. I guess they were hoping that many desktop users would buy the VelociRaptor. Still, why not just make the HLFS? You can mount the HLFS in a standard PC case anyway.
Well .. at first they make GLFS .. then only .. oops realize their mistake and make HLFS ... that's the story..
Velociraptor was designed for consumer at first, I guess. AFAIK, they may also fix the noisy GLFS model caused of the vibration proned heatsink.
Hmm.. I think the heatsink is pretty much the same as that of the HLFS and mounted the same way. Looks like it was "bonded" to four metal "shoes" on the heatsink very securely, so I don't think the heatsink will cause a significant amount of vibration unless the GLFS heatsink is quite flexible.
The heatsink doesn't have to be flexible to cause any vibration. The best example would be mounting the HDD to your case. It will definitely be much noisier than not mounting on to the case. The heatsink design between GLFS and HLFS is very different.
Hmm .. no more GLFS for me to test .. lol .. yes design is very different. HLFS has to accommodate an extra PCB.
Silent PC Review actually highlighted the noise issue to WD, and they were surprised about their findings. I think WD may have done some improvement in terms on the heatsink vibration along with the SATA backplane support. In terms of idle noise level, Velociraptor beats all 3.5" drives, including GP series. That's what SPCR mentioned. This was one of the main reason why I considered this drive. If the drive sounded like the pre-FDB days, I wouldn't even consider... Since this drive is made here, maybe Mike knows something about the improvement made on this drive.
Nope. I don't know. I am not the Product team. Every drive is a black box to me; I won't know until go poke around in the system.
is a little bit base of 2.5" ... which did not have any sound at all .. WD is the best so far when it comes to noise level. At least the latest product....
I didn't really hear any whining noise, but maybe the surroundings were not quiet enough. Is it better/worse than your WD5000AAKS?
Oh...I mean generally, not this HDD. I'm quite happy with it. I can't hear much whining noise, if there's any.