TS, I am sorry for the OT but I have to ask this question to Frost.
How is the Velociraptor as a boot drive, is it quite? And how about the temperature?
My current boot drive is a 64GB SSD SATA II, it is quite fast for being on a SATA I bus. It always stays below 40C even on extreme hot and humid weather here in the tropics.
How would the velociraptor compare to an SSD?
Again I am sorry for the OT.
Sorry for the delay in response, haven't been by the forum in a few days.
Velociraptor is fantastic as a boot drive. As should be expected of a 10,000 rpm drive, no, it is not really quiet when you're doing a lot of reads. You'll hear it clicking away as it works. That said it's not overly or annoyingly loud by any stretch of the imagination. And when it's just spinning and not doing rapid reads, it's every bit as quiet as a 7200 rpm. It's also extremely fast; real world feel is about on par with a low-end SSD, but for vastly more capacity and much lower price versus even budget SSDs.
Far as temperature, the Velociraptor is actually the coolest hard drive I've ever had. The 2.5" drive itself does generate a pretty good amount of heat, but the big black IcePak heatsink WD mounts them in to make the drive 3.5"
more than counters that. The Velociraptor actually runs a few degrees cooler than the Constellation, which is itself quite cool. I have never seen the Velociraptor exceed 38°C even under heavy sustained load, it usually runs around 35-36°C, and idling it gets as low as 32°C. That's in the upper bay of a Quad G5 in a room kept around 22-23°C.
Basically I bought it to experiment with after it got stellar reviews last year since I needed more space in the G5 and Apple only gave us two drive bays, so I have to make both count. I've been extremely satisfied with it and would highly recommend it to anyone that wants significantly faster speed than a 7200 rpm HDD but with much higher capacity than SSD. There's also the factor of a 1TB Velociraptor being $230 versus the $1500-2500 that 1TB SSDs are still commanding, and WD classifying it as an enterprise-class drive, thus a full 5 year warranty.