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
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011
Two years ago we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. I assembled the traces myself out of frustration with the majority of what we have today in terms of SSD benchmarks.
Although the AnandTech Storage Bench tests did a good job of characterizing SSD performance, they weren't stressful enough. All of the tests performed less than 10GB of reads/writes and typically involved only 4GB of writes specifically. That's not even enough exceed the spare area on most SSDs. Most canned SSD benchmarks don't even come close to writing a single gigabyte of data, but that doesn't mean that simply writing 4GB is acceptable.
Originally I kept the benchmarks short enough that they wouldn't be a burden to run (~30 minutes) but long enough that they were representative of what a power user might do with their system.
Not too long ago I tweeted that I had created what I referred to as the Mother of All SSD Benchmarks (MOASB). Rather than only writing 4GB of data to the drive, this benchmark writes 106.32GB. It's the load you'd put on a drive after nearly two weeks of constant usage. And it takes a *long* time to run.
1) The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on the times when your I/O activity is the highest. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. My thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives.
2) I tried to cover as many bases as possible with the software I incorporated into this test. There's a lot of photo editing in Photoshop, HTML editing in Dreamweaver, web browsing, game playing/level loading (Starcraft II & WoW are both a part of the test) as well as general use stuff (application installing, virus scanning). I included a large amount of email downloading, document creation and editing as well. To top it all off I even use Visual Studio 2008 to build Chromium during the test.
The test has 2,168,893 read operations and 1,783,447 write operations. The IO breakdown is as follows:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 28% | |||
| 16KB | 10% | |||
| 32KB | 10% | |||
| 64KB | 4% | |||
Only 42% of all operations are sequential, the rest range from pseudo to fully random (with most falling in the pseudo-random category). Average queue depth is 4.625 IOs, with 59% of operations taking place in an IO queue of 1.
Many of you have asked for a better way to really characterize performance. Simply looking at IOPS doesn't really say much. As a result I'm going to be presenting Storage Bench 2011 data in a slightly different way. We'll have performance represented as Average MB/s, with higher numbers being better. At the same time I'll be reporting how long the SSD was busy while running this test. These disk busy graphs will show you exactly how much time was shaved off by using a faster drive vs. a slower one during the course of this test. Finally, I will also break out performance into reads, writes and combined. The reason I do this is to help balance out the fact that this test is unusually write intensive, which can often hide the benefits of a drive with good read performance.
There's also a new light workload for 2011. This is a far more reasonable, typical every day use case benchmark. Lots of web browsing, photo editing (but with a greater focus on photo consumption), video playback as well as some application installs and gaming. This test isn't nearly as write intensive as the MOASB but it's still multiple times more write intensive than what we were running in 2010.
As always I don't believe that these two benchmarks alone are enough to characterize the performance of a drive, but hopefully along with the rest of our tests they will help provide a better idea.
The testbed for Storage Bench 2011 has changed as well. We're now using a Sandy Bridge platform with full 6Gbps support for these tests.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Heavy Workload
The old VelociRaptor remained the fastest mechanical drive we'd tested using our heavy workload, and the new one pushed the bar up by another 31%. It's the SSD comparison that makes the VR a tough choice for a primary drive, but if you need a really fast hard drive to augment your SSD the VelociRaptor is quick. Note that the Momentus XT lacks write caching at this point, which hurts its chances in our write intensive heavy workload.
AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload
Our new light workload actually has more write operations than read operations. The split is as follows: 372,630 reads and 459,709 writes. The relatively close read/write ratio does better mimic a typical light workload (although even lighter workloads would be far more read centric).
The I/O breakdown is similar to the heavy workload at small IOs, however you'll notice that there are far fewer large IO transfers:
| AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 - Light Workload IO Breakdown | ||||
| IO Size | % of Total | |||
| 4KB | 27% | |||
| 16KB | 8% | |||
| 32KB | 6% | |||
| 64KB | 5% | |||
Once again we see a significant step forward compared to the old VelociRaptor, and any other hard drive for that matter. The new VR distances itself from its predecessor by 39% and from the fastest 7200RPM 3.5" drive we've tested by 55%. It's the almighty SSD that the VelociRaptor can't beat.
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TiGr1982 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
I've read similar feedback from the person running 6 years old Raptor. He wrote the same - S.M.A.R.T. is fully clean after 6 years of intensive use. If so, Raptor robustness and longevity deserves real respect.Casper42 - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
I can still see this being used in a decent gaming rig.120 / 160GB SATA 6Gb SSD for OS and Basic Apps
500GB / 1TB VR333M for Games (my Steam folder just keeps growing and growing) and any Video Editing
2 / 3 / 4 TB "Green" drive for Data Files and to backup (offline) the SSD occasionally.
Then a SATA Optical drive as well.
All that fits easily in most mATX Cases and only needs 4 SATA connections.
I am running a 64GB / 600GB VR / 2 x 2TB Green setup in my main machine currently and I can say it works very well. Most FPS style games these days are very sequential Reads because when you load a map its usually a several hundred MB file which Windows will try to keep sequential (defragged)
MichaelD - Monday, April 16, 2012 - link
I finally moved to a SSD for a System drive a few months ago; awesome improvement. However, many gamers (like me) looking for a fast drive to load games from can't afford a large SSD.I have a 150GB Velociraptor from a few years back; it can't hold all my games so I'm not using it. The new 500GB model is exactly what I've been waiting for; and it's at a reasonable pricepoint too. I haven't found any online yet. Any idea where to look and when they'd be available?
patpro - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
Unfortunately, the solution consisting in pairing a SSD with a HDD is mostly "Windows only". I'm using Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Linux (on different computers), and there is no consumer product for me to create a bundle of SSD/HDD with a software caching solution. Needless to say I'm a big advocate of hardware solutions, anything that would work without installing a dedicated software on the OS.Hard drives with 32 or 34 GB nand flash read/write cache on top of good old platters would be so great...
Traciatim - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
Is there any way you can test drives in real world scenarios? Sure 4K random reads are nice to show the differences between SSD's and Platters, but in the real world how many scenarios are you really going to see that kind of data access?It would be nice if you would run something like Ultimate Defrag and run through some common level load tests games, boot times, Launch three applications sequentially, launch three applications at the same time, a virus scan, and all kinds of other common tasks like these.
MichaelD - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
After reading the comments about the Seagate Momentus XT drives, I did some research and was pretty blown away. The XTs truly seem like the drives to beat. The responsiveness of a SSD with the capacity of a platter-based HD for a very reasonable price. A certain egg-ish etailer even has a sale on them ATM. I bought two of the 500GB drives last night. One for my netbook to replace it's 5400-rpm drive and the other to load my games from on my PC. Thanks for pointing out the XT drives, guys!TiGr1982 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
Indeed, Seagate Momentus XT IS the way to go for upgrade. Recently I upgraded my laptop (Acer 7552G, Win 7 SP1, AMD Danube platform, SB850 southbridge) with Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB, and now it runs MUCH faster than before, because HDD is no longer the bottleneck. I hope, so will be the case for you :)The only probable caveat is there can be compatibility issues with Momentus XT, but, as far as I know, these problems can happen only on Mac laptops, not PC laptops.
TiGr1982 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
These are my 2 cents. Everybody, including Anand himself, is complaining about the absence of NAND flash in new Raptors. My personal opinion is as follows: WD ARE HDD guru's, and their overall HDD market record is nice, but, probably, up to now, they didn't make the proper R'n'D effort to integrate the NAND. So now, looking at Seagate, even if they appreciate the advantage of employing internal NAND in HDD for caching, they can't catch up easily.Obviously, looking "under the hood", soldering the NAND flash to the HDD PCB is surely not enough; you need the SSD controller for this NAND and, more important, you need the proper firmware to use this NAND reasonably, together with the main storage, i.e. disk platters. I believe, developing of this firmware itself is not so simple. Recall that Seagate was polishing the firmware for the first gen Momentus XT (500 GB, 4 GB NAND) for around a year AFTER its actual release on the market. Same thing probably will happen with the second gen of Momentus XT (750 GB, 8 GB NAND) . This circumstance clearly points out that even in Seagate case, the whole hybrid tech is in the intermediate, but not final, stage.
Also, recall that Seagate started experimenting with flash in HDD in Windows Vista times, with Momentus PSD, around 2007, which is an "ancient time" on computer hardware timescale.
So, what do you want from WD? :)
TiGr1982 - Tuesday, April 17, 2012 - link
Saying, R'n'D, I actually meant R&D, just the notations, you understand :)JimmiG - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 - link
I went with a standard 7200 RPM, 1TB drive and then added a 64GB OCZ Synapse Cache SSD. The SSD costs $100, so the total is still lower than the Velociraptor. It's the "dream" mentioned in the conclusion and it's already here (as long as you don't mind running Windows 7, and have the space for two drives).