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
Final Words
In the days before SSDs, the VelociRaptor was the drive that raised the cost per GB ceiling. These days, the 600GB drive almost seems like a bargain. Have a look:
| Cost Comparison of Modern HDDs/SSDs | |||||||
| Drive | Capacity | Price | Cost per Gigabyte | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M | 600GB | $329 | $0.548 | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M | 450GB | $299 | $0.664 | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150M | 300GB | $199 | $0.663 | ||||
| Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX | 1TB | $120 | $0.120 | ||||
| Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS | 2TB | $250 | $0.125 | ||||
| Intel X25-M G2 | 160GB | $414 | $2.588 | ||||
| Intel X25-M G2 | 80GB | $220 | $2.750 | ||||
Western Digital's pricing picks up where the VR150M left off and drops the cost per gigabyte significantly for the 600GB drive. At $329 vs. $299, I'm not sure there's even a reason to consider the 450GB offering. That extra $30 buys you 150GB at $0.20 per GB. Now obviously compared to a high end 7200 RPM drive, you are paying a price premium for the VelociRaptor. Based on our tests I'd expect to see a 5 - 10% increase in overall system performance compared to a current generation, 7200RPM drive. If you have particularly random workloads, the performance gap can can grow to be something much higher in the 15 - 20% range (or beyond if you're truly I/O bound).
Our AnandTech Bench gaming workload does make the argument that if you're primarily interested in using this drive for games, you might be better served by a larger 3.5" drive. Game installs are pretty big these days and when playing games you're mostly performing sequential reads off the disk, which wastes much of the benefit of the 10K RPM spindle speed. It's only if you're planning on having other apps running in the background that hit the disk while you game that you could benefit from the VelociRaptor.
The rest of the tests make it very clear. As far as hard drives go, you can't beat the random read/write performance of the new VelociRaptor. For applications that absolutely demand to be run on a physical disk, this is your best bet.
The problem is once you take into account solid state storage. The new VelociRaptor boasts a 4KB random write speed of 1.9MB/s. Intel's X25-M G2 is amost 20x faster. The new VelociRaptor averages 178 IOPS in our typical Bench workload, Intel's X25-M can push nearly 800 IOPS in the same test.
While you are getting much more storage for your dollar with the VelociRaptor, a higher performance alternative would be to combine a good SSD with a 1TB drive. Using the SSD for your OS and apps, and the TB drive for all of your music, photos, videos and games. It's this sort of configuration that I use in my personal desktop (except I have two 1TB drives in RAID-1).
If you can't go the SSD route but still need the performance, WD has retaken the crown with the new VelociRaptor. If you can make it work however, you may be happier with an X25-M and a WD Caviar Black instead.
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jasperjones - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I have the same question. How do you get 450GB capacity with a platter size of 200GB?By using three platters and rending some space on each platter unusuable??????
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Correct, you use 200GB platters and don't use all of the space. It's like microprocessor binning, but with platters instead :)Take care,
Anand
SunLord - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Hey Anand in theory wouldn't the 450GB drive be faster then a 600GB drive if they configured the firmware to not use the inner 50GB on each of the 3 platters?strikeback03 - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
Which would explain why there isn't much price difference between the 450 and 600GB models, but as you pointed out the price difference is so little as to be rather meaningless.Plus, with the combo of the 80GB X25-M and 1TB WD Black available for $10 more than the 600GB VR, the only consumer use for these I can see is if you are limited to a single drive with a tiny case or something.
Spivonious - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
A 400% price increase for 10-15% performance increase? No thanks, I'll stick with my regular old 7200RPM drive.Chloiber - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
These days, I don't see a reason why I should buy a Raptor. I get all my programs on an SSD, even some games. The rest of my data consinsts of music, movies and some archives. So basically I don't care about random read/write performance on these drives. Plus I need BIG drives. 1-2TB HDDs reach nearly the same sequential transfer rates as the raptors. Plus I dont wan't such noisy components in my system.If you only want 1 drive, then maybe the velociraptor is the way to go. But getting 1 drive is the worst decision one can make. I would rather get 2 crappy HDDs than 1 fast HDD.
As you wrote in the conclusion...performance wise, the raptors are really great, but these days, SSD + (cheap) HDD is the way to go imho.
vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Agreed. SSDs replaced the need for Raptors, which makes me sad. Other than that, cheap, flexible storage is needed - as attributed by Moore's Law.rpsgc - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
This review is useless without an SSD to compare to.vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
You're right, but as stated, go to the workbench and compare for those figures. You'll see that the SSDs would have drastically skewed the graphs.Voo - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Yeah but they could've been added to some of latter graphs without a problem (the AT bench for example), that would be inconsistent, but would give some nice overviews without clobbering the graphs too much.