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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HotFoot - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
People used to buy Raptors for the superior seek times. Where these drives were great was for loading programs. Throughput on large files isn't usually the consideration. RAID 0 does boost throughput, but increases seek time.But Raptors will never touch even the lowest-performance SSDs for random IO. These drives are completely obsolete as far as I can tell.
DanNeely - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Not quite completely, but the number of cases where a 7200RPM drive isn't fast enough, several hundred GB of high speed storage space is needed, and a $600-2000 sticker price for several SSDs is too high is much smaller than the raptor market was several years ago.I doubt we'll see a raptor revision after this one unless the cost of turning a SAS drive into a raptor is negligible.
marraco - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Worse, to match the storage capacity of the 450Gb raptor, you only need to use 10% of each 2Tb disk. This way you short stroke it, accelerating seek and random times.If you own an X58 chipset, you also may use the first partition as RAID0, and the remaining 90% space in RAID 0, or witouth RAID.
coolkev99 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
Not quite fair to compare the MSRP of a drive that's not even in the retail channel, to the discount OEM price of an existing drive.Belard - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Anyone else notice that "VR200M" is Subliminal Message to say "VROOM" as in fast? :)But these Raptors are simply not worth it any more. $330 for 600GB drive? Also they are the LOUDEST drives you can get over any other HD... and of course SDs wins hands down ag 0db.
The best setup is still the Hybrid SSD+HD for desktops.
$225 = 80GB intel X25-M G2 (Come on G3)
$ 85 = 1TB Seagate 7200.12 (On this review, Seagate are the quietest drives and its what I use)
$310 = Total for 1.08GB of storage that would dominate any Raptor.
synaesthetic - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
No, not one 80GB X-25M.Two 40GB X-25V in RAID 0.
:D
Romulous - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
You need to look at the point of the Raptor. Cheap, fast enterprise drives, which is a middle ground between sata and sas. I've setup several vsphere servers with 300GB raptors in raid 10 (8 drives) and they perform very well. Infact, even better than 8 15k sas drives in raid 5 on the same controller. For Virtual Machines, they work great. Of course this is no SAN thus no clustering is available.Xenoterranos - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Definitely glad I bought a 1TB caviar black. The performance benefits just aren't there given the loss in drive space, but for a high-end notebook, I could see it being a real competitor.AssBall - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
.... Except that it is too tall to fit in notebooks.Glenn - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I bought into the first three generations of Raptors for the seek times. That is the single most irritating thing for me when using a higher performance computer. Damn HDs always slow everything down. I have migrated to SSDs now and will never look back.And often left unsaid in Raptor discussions, is their propensity to get noisier and noisier over there lifespan, to the point you think there are gremlins living inside your computer!