Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
PCMark Vantage
PCMark Vantage is the latest benchmark available from Futuremark, and it is only for use with Windows Vista. Similar to the venerable PCMark05 in its makeup, Vantage modernizes the criteria and test methodology to reflect what users may encounter when running the new Windows OS and current applications. For the HD test suite, the white paper breaks the tests down as follows:
- Windows Defender: Windows Defender performs a scan operation, resulting in a read-intensive (99.5% read, 0.5% write) benchmark reflecting a common task in Windows Vista.
- Gaming Performance: Streaming performance is measured using actual game mechanics found in Alan Wake. This test is nearly all read (99.95% read, 0.05% write) in nature.
- Windows Photo Gallery: A large collection of images is imported into Windows Photo Gallery. This is the first of the tests which bring write performance into account in a meaningful way, with a roughly 84% read, 16% write ratio.
- Windows Vista Startup: Simulates Windows Vista startup operations, producing a test that breaks down to roughly 85% read and 15% write operations.
- Windows Movie Maker: The first of the Vantage tests which comes close to equally dividing read and write operations (54% read, 46% write), concurrent video performance is tested both for video read and skip performance, as well as video write operations.
- Windows Media Center:
Performing three distinct tasks:
- SDTV video playback
- SDTV video streaming to Extender for Windows Media Center
- SDTV video recording
- Windows Media Player: Adds music to Windows Media Player. This test reverts to favoring read operations (78% read, 22% write).
- Application
Loading: The following applications are loaded:
- Microsoft Word 2007
- Adobe Photoshop CS2
- Internet Explorer 7
- Outlook 2007
The total benchmark is roughly 87% reads and 13% writes in nature. We run each test five times per drive, producing a median score that we use for comparison in our charts.
The VelociRaptor just decimates the competition in our overall score results, unless you count the almost ridiculous benchmark scores of the Mtron SSD drive.
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OldWorlder - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Yes, that's always a good advice to have a system and work partition that is rather small (with some defrag from time to time) at the beginning of a disk!But there's also no need to "not use" the rest, as long as the files there are not accessed too often - mine seems to fill up faster than I can increase it with the next bigger disk while system/work stays constantly at 70G...
7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Would WD rush this product to reviewers and OEM's if the firmware was this poor? I mean honestly, you can tell this has the potential to be an outstanding product, but this is a PR nightmare. I'm willing to bet not all review sites are going to re-review once updated firmware comes out, and right now while it does quite well in the simulated benchmarks, it falls on its face during real-world applications.It's one thing to rush software out the door and patch later (or even hardware's software drivers), completely another when you do this with firmware.
I feel bad for the engineers, because I'm sure they were begging for another couple weeks to get the bugs out...
imaheadcase - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
It appears to be only a few sites with bad ones, storagereview.com review shows no issue.7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
How would only a few sites get a particular firmware version and others not? I understand this particular model might have a hardware issue, but its the firmware that I thought was the cause for performance issues.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I dont know either, but other sites are not having this issue. check out storagereview.com for a complete review.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Rather I should say read any or all of the other reviews...Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150
@ StorageReview
@ TechReport
@ HotHardware
@ PCPer
@ LegitReviews
No-one else seems to have any issues, although the incomplete firmware is mentioned.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
And this is why we state several times that we are calling this a preview and will withhold final judgment until we receive a new test drive. Clearly, the drive we were sent has some problems. They may be firmware related, or we may have a drive that has firmware + hardware problems. Maybe the firmware needs tuning to address a certain subset of drives that exhibit the poor performance characteristics we discovered. Whatever the case, we will have a full follow-up review in the near future.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
cool... I look forward to it.Zefram0911 - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I know removing the heatsink voids the warranty... but will the SATA and SATA power hookups match a hot swappable 3.5'' bay if the heatsink is removed? I know there would be an inch of extra space or so, but I'd like to keep my hotswap bay.johnsonx - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
While I don't know for sure, I will say NO, at least not without some creative rigging.