Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
HD Tune Pro 3.00
In our read tests, the VelociRaptor just runs (flies) away from the Raptor in the sustained transfer rate tests. The average transfer rate of 98.4 MB/s is about 36% faster than the 150GB drive, while burst rates improve 61% and access time by 18%. However, all is not well with our drive. Thanks to early firmware, the servo algorithms are not optimized, resulting in drastic slowdowns on the outer diameter of the platter area.
This resulted in several problems with our benchmark test suite. The consistency and validity of benchmark results did not meet our variation requirements during testing. The synthetic benchmarks typically generated results close to what WD is estimating with the final firmware results. However, our application benchmarks tell another story, especially those that have a high rate of sustained transfer activity.
In our write speed tests, we see a familiar pattern. The VelociRaptor offers a maximum write speed that is 26% faster, average write speed is 42% quicker, and burst rates are once again about 61% better. We consistently had a drop off at the beginning of the drive (the outer tracks on the platter) and it will be corrected with the final firmware revision before the drives ship.
We will expand the results of our file benchmarks in the full review. For the time being, we are showing how the two drives compare to each other with a file length of 32KB.
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DeepThought86 - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
Why oh why do you people insist on using new benchmarks all the time? How stupid is it that I can't go to your review of the Seagate 500GB from just last year and be able to compare performance with this new Velociraptor.Zak - Sunday, April 27, 2008 - link
Hm, so I guess this is not going to fit in a Mac Pro due to non-standard connector position. I bet there will be 3rd party replacements, but will this void the warranty?Z,
mvrx - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
I still find it strange that a drive only has 32MB of cache.. I'd think a gig or two would be on some high end drives..Xean - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
Is it suitable for laptops?strikeback03 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
As they mentioned, only ones that accept unusually tall 2.5 inch drives.Fricardo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
What happened to the hard drive review article that was supposed to come out a month or so ago? I'd really like to see a full comparison, especially of the new WD and Samsung drives.Deusfaux - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
#1. Tech Report says:"Western Digital says it's also working on a single-platter version of the drive, but that's not ready yet."
Gary can you verify this one way or another? What would the timeframe be?
#2. I have a couple spike drops when I bench one of my 2 Raptors with HDTach/HDTune. They're not right at the start, but they're there all the same.
What do they mean? I don't have them on my other Raptor.
Araemo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Haven't all raptors(and indeed, most 10k and 15k rpm drives) used 2.5" platters in their large casings? I thought that most/all high-end drive manufacturers used 2.5" platters due to the high angular velocities and vibration.In that case - the smaller drive size shouldn't have any negative impact on performance at all.
GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
In 2008, for their next generation Raptor, only 16MB Cache?CK804 - Monday, April 28, 2008 - link
Do people read anymore? The explanation is given on the second page:While the hot option on the latest 750GB~1TB drives is a 32MB buffer, WD is once again staying the course with a highly optimized 16MB cache. WD states they did not see any advantages to a 32MB cache on this drive and instead spent their engineering resources on optimizing the cache algorithms.