Western Digital’s VelociRaptor has been one of our preferred SATA drives for video editing for many years. This time around Western Digital improved the performance and raised the capacity to 1TB while maintaining low noise levels for a 10,000 RPM drive. We swapped out a 7200RPM HDD in our workstation with the 1TB VelociRaptor model #WD1000CHTZ and could not discern any change in overall noise levels coming from our system.
The increased capacity of the VelociRaptor will be welcomed by video editing professionals everywhere. We commonly edit multiple tracks of HD video in P2 format, MPEG4, Avid DNxHD and QuickTime ProRes. These projects balloon in size quickly even when using aggressive HD codecs so it’s critical to have enough capacity and overhead on a drive to confidently work on a few projects. RAID arrays are required for more extreme bit rates but we were happy with the performance of the 1TB VelociRaptor when editing DNxHD and ProRes timelines.
A few years ago we had a 300GB 3.5 inch form factor VelociRaptor fail on us and that was very disappointing. We were not even 1 year into using the product. However, since the move to the 2.5 inch form factor wrapped in the 3.5 inch heat sink not one VelociRaptor has failed on us. It’s been a rock solid “online” drive and we’re very happy to see Western Digital continue to make it.
However, we have to wonder if this is the last pure HDD version of the VelociRaptor that will be brought to market. SSDs and hybrid drives are the future and it’s only a matter of time before SSDs replace HDDs, especially at the lower capacities.
For now, the VelociRaptor remains the best price/performance option in a 1TB drive for video editing professionals.