Western Digital's New VelociRaptor VR200M: 10K RPM at 450GB and 600GB

Final Words

In the days before SSDs, the VelociRaptor was the drive that raised the cost per GB ceiling. These days, the 600GB drive almost seems like a bargain. Have a look:

Western Digital's pricing picks up where the VR150M left off and drops the cost per gigabyte significantly for the 600GB drive. At $329 vs. $299, I'm not sure there's even a reason to consider the 450GB offering. That extra $30 buys you 150GB at $0.20 per GB. Now obviously compared to a high end 7200 RPM drive, you are paying a price premium for the VelociRaptor. Based on our tests I'd expect to see a 5 - 10% increase in overall system performance compared to a current generation, 7200RPM drive. If you have particularly random workloads, the performance gap can can grow to be something much higher in the 15 - 20% range (or beyond if you're truly I/O bound).

Our AnandTech Bench gaming workload does make the argument that if you're primarily interested in using this drive for games, you might be better served by a larger 3.5" drive. Game installs are pretty big these days and when playing games you're mostly performing sequential reads off the disk, which wastes much of the benefit of the 10K RPM spindle speed. It's only if you're planning on having other apps running in the background that hit the disk while you game that you could benefit from the VelociRaptor.

The rest of the tests make it very clear. As far as hard drives go, you can't beat the random read/write performance of the new VelociRaptor. For applications that absolutely demand to be run on a physical disk, this is your best bet.

The problem is once you take into account solid state storage. The new VelociRaptor boasts a 4KB random write speed of 1.9MB/s. Intel's X25-M G2 is amost 20x faster. The new VelociRaptor averages 178 IOPS in our typical Bench workload, Intel's X25-M can push nearly 800 IOPS in the same test.

While you are getting much more storage for your dollar with the VelociRaptor, a higher performance alternative would be to combine a good SSD with a 1TB drive. Using the SSD for your OS and apps, and the TB drive for all of your music, photos, videos and games. It's this sort of configuration that I use in my personal desktop (except I have two 1TB drives in RAID-1).

If you can't go the SSD route but still need the performance, WD has retaken the crown with the new VelociRaptor. If you can make it work however, you may be happier with an X25-M and a WD Caviar Black instead.