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
Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
Impacting overall system performance with just a hard drive change is difficult if you're comparing fairly quick drives. You'll note that despite the competitive sequential speeds of the newer 7200RPM TB drives, the 300GB VelociRaptor is still on top. It just goes to show you the value of random access performance. It's not everything, but it's something worth paying attention to.
Compared to the old VelociRaptor, the new 600GB drive posts a 7% higher overall score in PCMark Vantage. The gains in the individual tests range from 3 to 20%.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are effectively read tests since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. Actual game loading performance will differ depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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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.