Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB (WD1000DHTZ) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 16, 2012 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
- HDDs
- Western Digital
- VelociRaptor
PCMark 7 Performance
For workloads that are particularly read intensive and small enough to make good use of the on-board NAND, the Momentus XT cannot be beat. The VelociRaptor does come very close however, and it does win in enough other benchmarks to make it clearly the better overall performer. Philosophically I understand why Western Digital opted against equipping the VR with any NAND (cached operations do sort of defeat the purpose of having a 10,000 RPM spindle speed), but that doesn't change the fact that it would've made for one pretty impressive hard drive.
Power Consumption
Despite its 2.5" form factor (the drive itself), the VelociRaptor's 15mm height prevented it from being used as a notebook drive. Even if you had a thick enough notebook, the VR's power consumption is more in-line with a 5400RPM 3.5" drive than a standard 2.5" mobile drive. That being said, as a 10,000RPM 3.5" drive the VelociRaptor is quite power efficient. Idle power is competitive with WD's Caviar Green (and lower in the case of load power).
Power consumption is down compared to the previous generation as well. Once again, compared to an SSD however the drive isn't anywhere near efficient.
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justniz - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
As this is apparently just a 2.5" SATA drive attached to a big heatsink, would there be any issues if you unmounted it from the heatsink and put it in a laptop?Does the drive really generate so much heat it needs a heatsink to run?
I'm guessing that the only real problem would be because its a 10k spin speed it consumes slightly more power than a conventional drive, so your maximum time on just battery power would suffer a little.
kyuu - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
Sticking one of these in a laptop would probably be a bad idea due to power usage, noise, and heat.kyuu - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
Oh, and vibration.jabber - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
Yeah and arent they thicker too?Nihility - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
It's twice as thick as a 7mm drive.kmmatney - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
For a laptop, the Seagate Momentus XT is just a way better option...TiGr1982 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
It is . Recently I upgraded my laptop (Acer 7552G, AMD Danube platform, SB850 sourhbridge) with Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB, and now it runs MUCH faster than before, because HDD is no longer the bottleneck.eanazag - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
I won't buy the mobile Seagate XT with NAND simply because it does not support RAID. Has anyone RAIDed an XT and have some reliability experience on this in RAID 5, 1, and 0? I would opt for a few of these for cheap storage servers and when SSD caches fail to hold the requested data. I do wish the power usage was a little lower, but this is a really inexpensive enterprise drive.I bought 74GB Raptors when the max size was 150GB. I had 2; one is still chugging and one keeled over after 6 years. The dead one died in a VMware server where I was using it to hold install ISOs. I have been happy with them.
With linear scaling I like 2 or 3 of these in RAID 0. 400MB-600MB of seq. read and write.
kyuu - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
What? You can RAID the Momentus XTs just fine. Where did you hear that you can't RAID them?Ramon Zarat - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
Still have the 36GB version in my file server boot drive (used to have 2 in RAID0 on my main computer). Has been running practically non stop for nearly 10 years now! Not even a single bad sector. Amazing quality.