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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gammaray - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 - link
Those drives dont make any senses at all at their pricing range. None whatsoever. at 300ish$ you can get an awesome SSD, fast and quite large relatively speaking.If you really need lots of GBs then one has to go with the 2-3Tbs for half the price.
Even with a 25% cut i would never consider the new velociraptor offering.
What are they thinking?
gammaray - Wednesday, April 18, 2012 - link
Also,while it doesnt affect performance, SSDs are SILENT
and silence is worth a lot.
JonnyDough - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
"There's just one problem: Moore's Law is driving the cost of SSDs down, and their capacities up. The shift to solid state storage is inevitable for most, but to remain relevant in the interim the VelociRaptor needed an update."Moore's Law is doing it? Really? All by itself? I'm sure it has nothing to do with economies of scale....
Maybe someone should take some college courses and not try to sound so smart.
DukeN - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
Maybe a 16GB $50 caching SSD, perhaps?superccs - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
a 1Tb WD Black or Samsung/Seagate F3 is $130 and they are fast.a 1Tb Raptor is ~$280 if you can find one....
Is it 2x as fast or did WD just release a product with an impossibly small niche?
We all know that the smaller SSD + 1Tb fast platter works well for system drives. Would anyone recommend this drive for that 1Tb duty over any of the competitors?
UberApfel - Thursday, April 19, 2012 - link
Nobody knowledgeable buys a VelociRaptor for I/O performance nowadays. They buy them for peace-of-mind; reliability.How about some estimated reliability graphs? At least of the previous model?
maz35 - Saturday, April 21, 2012 - link
would a ssd and VelociRaptor be good for a gaming rig?Tchamber - Saturday, April 21, 2012 - link
Wouldn't be bad at all. I have two of the original 300gb Velociraptors in RAID0, and they're fast enough that I don't feel the need to upgrade to an SSD.Jeff9329 - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - link
I understand that SSDs are far faster, but it's seems to me they are still currently well over 3X as expensive. I was just looking at a 600GB Intel SSD but it was over $1,000USD.I would like to update one of my video editing machines from a 300GB Velociraptor boot drive (almost full) to a 600GB SSD boot drive, but the cost is awfully high.
Im also not sure I can use my existing image on the SSD. Re-building the editing suite configuration on a new drive would take days. Can you move an SSD image to another SSD or do you get caught up in re-building the drive image with each new SSD drive?
As for the 1 TB Velociraptor, it's a little large for a boot drive, but too small for a video editing data drive. However, the price is right, so using it for a boot drive is an idea.
astrojny - Friday, May 4, 2012 - link
Wouldn't that make a lot of sense. For around $400 you should get a very speedy setup no?