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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vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Agreed, it could be done, but it would also cause more confusion when you could see data in one place, but not in another. Not to mention, it's probably easier not to have to worry about it from an editor's standpoint - a bad excuse, but probably true.vol7ron
Muon - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Skewing the graphs is a ludicrous argument not to include SSD in the test. Why not use a logarithmic scale? I guess maybe people in the USA are too dumb to understand such graphs and would think the performance difference is much smaller then it really is.Earthmonger - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
What would be the point of including SSD results?Would you compare a horse and buggy to a turbo-diesel 18-wheeler?
A wax candle to a halogen headlamp?
HotFoot - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
People aren't really selling oxen and wagons to compete with 18-wheelers, whereas the Raptor here is a new product brought into the high-performance storage for desktops market. It certainly is competing against SSDs or a combination of SSD+HDD.I think the general consensus is if you're wanting a lot of performance in a desktop, you'd do better to take the $330 and buy an 80 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. I think, given it's about the same price for nearly double the storage capacity, it's be a VERY interesting combination to see on the performance charts.
This entire article basically starts out with the understanding that the new Raptors were obsolete before they ever launched to market.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
The assumption here is someone who wants a VelociRaptor for whatever reason has already ruled out an SSD. If I threw in SSD results it'd be very difficult to make comparisons between the VR and other hard drives as they'd get compressed in the chart.In the not too distant future we'll allow cross technology comparisons between HDDs and SSDs in Bench, but until then I figured just pointing folks at Bench if they wanted SSD results would suffice.
Take care,
Anand
jimhsu - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Not exactly. Even using this drive in lieu of a SSD for a boot drive is "stupid" (which I think it is), people with hundreds of gigabytes of Steam games or such simply aren't satisfied with the performance of a 1 TB drive. Putting 500 GB of games on SSD is ... expensive. Plus as I have shown in some forum posts, *most* modern games aren't so sensitive to random read/write rates anyways, so the benefit of a SSD is less than for general apps. (MMORPGs, particularly WoW in my testing, are a very clear exception)vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
@Muon:
"Skewing the graphs is a ludicrous argument not to include SSD in the test."
I'm guessing most figures from these tests are not done all at once. The charts are more likely a compilation of all the singular tests for that product, for that test bed. Meaning one test may have been run a month ago. Therefore, the SSDs are included in the tests, the results are just posted someplace else. -- go check the storage bench
"Why not use a logarithmic scale?"
Charts are included to have something visible and simple, not something you want to have think about to understand what it represents - that's the whole idea of chart vs table. Bar graphs are perfect because they are proportional and are able to list quanity, rather than a power or base of that quanity. Additionally, how would propose introducing a logarithmic chart - instituting a trendline? - if you take each value to the same base log, you're going to have the same problem with scale, and if you're using the trendline, your graph may be relational, but it will be also be visually innacurate for this type of data.
"I guess maybe people in the USA are too dumb to understand such graphs and would think the performance difference is much smaller then it really is."
That may be. Again, you'd be losing the quick-glance feature of the charts. Not to mention, AT probably has some simple charting software (or macros) that they use, which would need to be changed. If something is so much different, it's not worth including or modifying the portion of your chart. SSDs are in a league of their own and therefore have their own charts - HDDs are included in them because they won't skew the SSD chart AND the value doesn't need to be legible, all that needs to be seen is that the HDDs are insignificant. Because this particular value is about HDDs, the visual true-value comparison is necessary. You would not get that if an SSD was present.
vol7ron
vol7ron - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I'm just curious what the Windows index rating is. I know that doesn't really account for anything, but I like looking at that, for some awful reason.RaistlinZ - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I can buy two Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB drives ($180.00) and put them in RAID 0 and get way more performance, and way more storage space, for 2/3 of the price of the 450GB Raptor. So what's the point of these Raptors exactly? I still don't see where they fit in.Fastidious - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Yeah, they seem pointless. I never understood why people buy them. With SSD around now it's just that much worse.