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.

Random Read/Write Speed Overall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
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  • Per Hansson - Saturday, April 10, 2010 - link

    I agree and would also like to see how a drive like the Cheetah 15k.7 would perform vs this VelociRaptor
  • Den - Monday, April 12, 2010 - link

    I have the (old) 150 GB raptor. What happened to make the 2.5" ones (300 and 600 both) so much noisier than the old 150? 8.5 - 9 dB(A) louder is about three times as loud!
  • bakedalaskan - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link

    Though not a price/performance issue along the lines of this article, I notice the position of the SATA connectors appear to be relocated through some kind of adapter compared to the original design 300GB VelociRaptor/ICEPAK combination. My complaint with the original 300GB drive/ICEPAK is that they don't fit in the drive tray system that I like to use on all my PC's. It appears that the new design would address standard SATA drive tray and hot swap backplane standards.
  • dude117 - Tuesday, August 17, 2010 - link

    would this make sense as a datastore for a ESX4.1 home lab to run around 20 VMs , mostly Win2003/2008, off?

    I would prefer a SSD drive but i am not sure how fast the drive will be dead if the VMs are constantly utilized.
  • Romulous - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link

    I have configured several vsphere 4 servers running 8 * 300G raptors in raid 10 on a 3ware (now LSI) 9650SE controller. This configuration is very fast. (8 drives in raid 5 takes a fair performance hit though). A single drive would only work if only one operation happened at a time. This configuration would not make a serious server. It all depends on the work load you anticipate. The production servers we run for one type of VM service have 48GB ram and dual quad xeons, plus the 8 raptors in raid 10. They run over 30 VMs. File system space is the real limiting factor without a SAN.
  • GTXRaptor - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    What would really be a mind = blown moment would be a VelociRaptor SSD.
    Fastest SSD on the planet :).

    One can dream.
  • crackedcoms - Thursday, January 12, 2012 - link

    Learn about the latest Xrumer news today its cool and has stuff and ewrwe yeahhh

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