Western Digital's New VelociRaptor VR200M: 10K RPM at 450GB and 600GB
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2010 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Performance Across All Tracks
Hard drives are made up of one or more circular platters. Platters are written from the outside inward in order to maximize performance (you cover more data in a single rotation of an outer track vs an inner track). I used HDTach to characterize the new VelociRaptor's performance across all LBAs:
Average read/write speed over the drive's capacity is around 130MB/s. The minimum sequential speed you'll see is around 90MB/s, while the maximum is over 140MB/s. The burst speed here is only 213.6 MB/s, which isn't enough to saturate 3Gbps SATA. In my tests, using the X58's 3Gbps controller yielded better performance with the new VelociRaptor than hooking it up to a 3rd party Marvell 6Gbps controller.
While hard drives are starting to embrace the 6Gbps standard, it's simply not necessary from a performance standpoint.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
77 Comments
View All Comments
Aezay - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
The model used in this review is the new WD1002FAEX disk, which is the upgrade to the WD1001FALS model. This new drive is considerably faster, even compared to the 2TB Black (WD2001FASS).http://gigglehd.com/zbxe/files/attach/images/89985...
Imperceptible - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Not according to this review: http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=870&type=expe...Belard - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Er... either way... that is more up to the user.RAID 0 adds several additional points of failure... Considering how fast G2 as it is. G3 with SATA 3.0 would be more exciting thou... :)
I'd still go with a single drive. That is me.
Imperceptible - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Replying to the wrong comment? This has nothing to do with RAID. Just simply mentioning that the WD Black 2TB is the fastest single mechanical drive and it would have been nice if it was used in this review. But in the real world, I'd only ever use it as a storage hdd, with an SSD as the main drive.deputc26 - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I as thinking the same, 2Tb Black is this drives nearest non-SSD competitor.Romulous - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
I concur. The WD2003FYYS is no slouch.vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
First pass:there in while -> there in a while
Also when typing a comment, if you forget the subject, this is the error message:
"Account creation was unsuccessful. Please correct the errors and try again."
I think "account creation" is a little misleading. Perhaps a "Please type in a subject" would be okay.
DanNeely - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I'm a bit confused. If these are using 200GB platters both the 450 and 600GB versions are both 3 platter drives which doesn't really make sense. A 2 platter 400GB model would be a more reasonable step down from the top.vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Perhaps the 450GB drives, which as Anand has indicated is using 150GB platters, are really using damaged 200GB platters due to the manufacturing anomalies.- just a hypothesis that needs testing.
vol7ron
DanNeely - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Where does it indicate that the 450 is using a 150GB platter? The table on the first page lists it as a 200GB. The 150 is the prior generation model.