 Welcome to my unboxing of something that is bucking the trend. This is the WD Velociraptor 1TB. So you guys remember the Raptor. So the Raptor first arrived on the scene in a capacity that honestly was unusable. It's 36GB. It's like, I mean that's like when SSDs first showed up and you're kinda looking at it going well okay so I could put my OS on it in like one game. Mind you at the time you could put more games than one game because games were smaller. Now that games are like 17 gigs or more for certain games, I mean my Dragon Age Origins game is like 30 gigs or something like that. So okay, we've determined that the Raptor while it was fast and cool and relevant at the time is now too small, too slow and hasn't existed for a very long time. Now the Velociraptor came along and rejuvenated the Raptor line. The Velociraptor was available in higher capacities, it was faster and more efficient and even then at the time it was still not that relevant because SSDs were getting higher in capacity, they were getting lower in price and they were so much faster that you're kinda looking at it going well like oh that doesn't really make that much sense. This looks like a game changer. This is the Velociraptor 1TB. So we're a long way away from high performance SSDs that are 1TB and come in at a reasonable price. The Velociraptor 1TB comes in at a very reasonable price. Remember magnetic storage is still many times cheaper per gigabyte compared to solid state storage. What's the application of this? Is it for a boot drive? Personally I would say no. I would say still this has a very valid place in a high performance system whether it's a workstation or even a gaming rig where you're using an SSD as your boot drive and you're using a Velociraptor 1TB or even a rate of multiple Velociraptor 1TB in the context of needing high performance storage that also needs a lot of capacity. So if you're using it as a scratch drive working on very very large files. If you're using it to store your Steam library, so maybe you've got Windows installed on your SSD a couple key applications but you've got a huge Steam library of games that is always expanding well you can't keep that on an SSD and honestly your storage system doesn't make that much of a difference except maybe with game loading times when you're popping into the game in terms of actually launching games and playing single player especially it doesn't make that much of a difference although it's nice to have the little boost especially well like I said when you're loading games particularly for multiplayer. So yeah okay useful for gamers but most of the focus is on professionals. Professionals need the capacity, professionals need the speed but don't necessarily want to compromise too much in either direction. So that's where the Velociraptor 1TB comes in. We're actually going to be doing full coverage of this on NCIX Tech Tips so don't forget to subscribe to my NCIX Com channel but I just wanted to take a couple minutes, open her up, show you guys what a Velociraptor 1TB looks like. This is a 2.5 inch thick drive so you can't just take it off the included adapter and throw it in a notebook it most likely won't fit. It comes with a heatsink because this is a 10,000 RPM drive so that's where it gets the additional performance. It also gets additional performance from its form factor. The fact that it is a 2.5 inch drive compared to a 3.5 inch drive means that the platters are much smaller. Smaller platters means that your access times are much lower as well because the head physically doesn't have to move as far in order to access the data that you need. The faster spinning platter also gives it additional sequential performance on both reads and writes which is again another advantage of magnetic storage over solid state storage. If you're doing something very write intensive a Velociraptor is probably a better solution than an SSD just due to the fact that SSDs do eventually die. I recently had an SSD die in my Windows home server actually which is a very write intensive application. I was using it as my boot drive and it also throws it into the drive pool. So for an application where it's going to get beat up like crazy magnetic may still be the way to go. So there you go. Thank you for checking out. Oh right okay I should finish showing you guys the heatsink. So it's got like this beastly heatsink on it which looks amazing. It's awesome. Cool. There you go. It's also got an adapter right here so you're taking the smaller SATA interface and you're kind of moving it a little to the left. It's actually a full size SATA interface. You're moving it over here where you can easily plug it into a three and a half inch bay in your system. Okay. And right so why the heatsink? Because 10,000 RPM drives will run hotter unless you're cooling them. So this takes care of that. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more Unboxing Reviews and other computer videos.