Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite

Hook Me Up

We will start utilizing three different platforms for our storage tests shortly. Our plan is to provide periodic performance comparisons of platforms based on the Intel/NVIDIA/AMD chipsets.

Our testbed uses an MSI HD-3870 video card to ensure that our benchmarks are not GPU bound. Our video tests run at a 1280x1024 resolution at High Quality settings. All of our tests run in an enclosed case with an optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. We fully patch the OS and load a clean drive image for each platform in order to make sure that driver conflicts are minimal.

We format before each test run and complete five tests on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. We remove the high and low scores and report the remaining score. The Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clear the prefetch folder after each benchmark.

Software Test Suite

With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we need a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. Our abbreviated benchmark suite for today's article will include:

• HD Tune
• Acoustics and Thermals
• WinRAR
• Nero Recode
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
• Crysis
• PCMark Vantage

Our benchmark suite will expand greatly for the full review of this drive and comparisons against SAS drives, including the new 1TB drive from Seagate.