WD VelociRaptor 500 GB Workstation Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, 10000 RPM, SATA III, 64 MB Cache

I didn't realize this was legit just the drive without the heat-sink but luckily I was replacing this exact drive so I just swapped the old one with the new one on the heat sink. No issues, it's fast and I god my OS on it easily.

I got this to go with a new copy of Windows 10 Pro which I plan on installing on this drive when my Win 8.1 drive get close to being full. (At present this might not be to long in the future.) I plan on taking my older WD 1 TB Black drive and making it a storage drive and putting the OS on this drive. A friend of mine had one of these and I was really impressed by it's speed and reliability. So when Win 10 came out I decided to get a new WD Velociraptor to run it on. At $199.99 for a brand new drive that has been selling for $232 looked like the time to buy and I did. At present, I plan on waiting till my Win 8.1 Pro system runs the free update to Win 10 Pro first and see what my current drive looks like before I proceed with the installation on the new drive, but given my experience, I expect no trouble....Update: 4/6/14: Just a note. I have this drive installed in Dell Inspiron 3847 along with two other drives. The Raptor is in the drive caddie on the bottom of the case along with another drive. (The other drive is mounted in the spare 5.4 bay with a 3.5 adapter.) I ran into one small problem that I was aware of but didn't know if it would show up in this case or not. I check my system temps on occasion and on one check I found the Raptor was running at 135 F . That's a bit to hot for me and I mounted a small case fan to the right of the drive caddie and since there is a four pin fan slot on the MB right next to the caddie that is not used it plugged in rather nicely there. Temp dropped down to around 90 to 99 F when in use. Much better. The fan "pulls" the air off the drive caddie not blowing air into it. Reason for this is the case has a set of large holes under the front of the case for ventilation which are just forward of the drive caddie and this set up pulls air thru them over the drives and not blowing case air over them. Works out great and temps look much better now.

I bought this WD Velociraptor drive to replace my 120GB Sandisk SSD that went bad for the 3rd time. This drive is very quiet and is probably about 75% as fast as the SSD that it replaced. I did have a very hard time getting my system to work with it the way I wanted it to. I have an ASUS P6t MOBO with 2 different hardware RAID configurations; one of them is on 2 dedicated SATA ports which I never used before. The other uses the remaining 6 SATA ports and you can place your drives on any of those ports and configure it through the Intel RAID configurator during bootup. Long story short- I could not attach the WD drive to the SATA port where the old SSD was before. Windows just would not load onto the WD drive and it gave me an error on install every time. I ended up having to put it on the JMicron RAID SATA port and all the other drives (4 others) on the other SATA ports. I don't know if its something I did wrong or a setting not set correctly but this is the only way that I could get everything to work together. It is used on a custom built HTPC system. I am happy with the new drive and am considering buying another identical drive to use in a RAID array to have a backup of the OS and all the installed apps in case of HD failure in the future.

I really didn't care much about getting a SSD. Granted, they are faster but comparing the cost and small gb size just wasn't worth it. The Velociraptor has performed well enough for me. Boot up time is quicker compared to may old 7200rpm drive. Everything seems to be quicker from accessing files to loading problems. No more sitting around waiting. Haven't done any video editing yet but overall very satisfied with this drive. Installation was easy and so far no problems. Somebody asked me "Why only 4 Stars". Answer: Because I didn't do any video editing so don't want people to buy this and expect something faster. Maybe somebody that has used it for editing or converting video can comment on performance. As far as everyday computing use, it's definitely a 5 star drive...IMPORTANT INFO UPDATE (SEPT. 6th 2013). My Velociraptor appears to be FAILING now. I keep getting CHKDSK running at every computer boot over the last month. More HD Sectors are going bad daily. I have already lost about 25GB of storage capacity due to this problem. I am contacting WD for a warranty replacement. This will be the first WD drive to ever go bad on me. Might just go back to a Black 7200 drive.