Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hook Me Up
| Standard Test
Bed Performance Test Configuration |
|
| Processor | Phenom 9850BE |
| RAM | 2x2GB GSkill PC2-8500 |
| OS Hard Drive | Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000RPM SATA |
| System Platform Drivers | ATI 8.4 |
| Video Cards | MSI HD 3870 |
| Video Drivers | ATI Catalyst 8.4 |
| CPU Cooling | Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-520HX |
| Optical Drive | LG GGCH20L - Blu-ray / HD-DVD Combo |
| Case | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Motherboards | MSI K9A2 Platinum |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 |
| . | |
We will start utilizing three different platforms for our storage tests shortly. Our plan is to provide periodic performance comparisons of platforms based on the Intel/NVIDIA/AMD chipsets.
Our testbed uses an MSI HD-3870 video card to ensure that our benchmarks are not GPU bound. Our video tests run at a 1280x1024 resolution at High Quality settings. All of our tests run in an enclosed case with an optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. We fully patch the OS and load a clean drive image for each platform in order to make sure that driver conflicts are minimal.
We format before each test run and complete five tests on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. We remove the high and low scores and report the remaining score. The Vista swap file is set to a static 2048MB and we clear the prefetch folder after each benchmark.
Software Test Suite
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we need a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. Our abbreviated benchmark suite for today's article will include:
- HD Tune
- Acoustics and Thermals
- WinRAR
- Nero Recode
- Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
- Crysis
- PCMark Vantage
Our benchmark suite will expand greatly for the full review of this drive and comparisons against SAS drives, including the new 1TB drive from Seagate.
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31 Comments
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AnnihilatorX - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I'd think real performance matters more than spec.I doubt on a fast spin drive 32MB cache would perform any better than 16MB cache, looking at the burst transfer rate of 110MB/s.
rudy - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
What about the fact you pay 300$ for it? For that I would say 32mb should be given if it does not hurt performance.GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
rudy,my logic exactly!
Razzbut - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
My question is - will it be quicker than 2x decent SATA IIs running in RAID 0?Focus here is price per performance of course, and capacity to boot!
AaronV - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
Exactly! I would also like to see this compared to MTRON's 3000 series of SSDs (the cheapest of which can be found for $369).Hulk - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Once the bugs get worked out of this one it looks like it will be a tremendous performer.And I have a feeling WDC knows that IT will be the drive that future SS drives will be compared so this will make it tougher for SS drives to look good in such comparisions. WDC is smart to push this technology now even though at this point SS drives aren't really viable competition. The storm is coming and they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
bobsonthegreat - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Surely it's only the real-world stuff that matters isn't it? Is this drive really that big a leap forward because you can load a game level half a second quicker? I'm not being pedantic, I'm just wondering when we'll see real gains in HDD performance. I always thought SSD drives would change the world but they're not really that much faster are they? Not REALLY.Ryan Norton - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I'm not happy to read that removing the Icepak hoopdyhoo voids your warranty. I use elastic suspension for the HDs in my Lian Li case so 2.5" form factor drives are actually better for me, and I would definitely consider getting one of these to replace my single 74GB Raptor if I could get one of the enterprise versions (or a retail one where I could remove the stupid "heat sink" without voiding a warranty).OldWorlder - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Just take any ordinaray 1TB Drive and store data on disk duplicated redundantly with 180 degree distance. Would result in 500GB with super-fast access. I would only need < 100GB that are really fast, so do it only with the outermost 200GB Area.Maybe add bigger write-cache or small flash backup for tags of sectors that are not yet duplicated from the last write.
Please, manufacturers, please!
retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Or you could just partition your current drive and not use the secondary partition... Perf increase is monimal, not huge.