Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Acoustics and Thermals
Our acoustic tests measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and under load while running the Hard Disk test suite within PCMark Vantage. We take measurements at a distance of 5mm from the rear and front of the drive in a separate enclosure and report the highest reading. The test room has a base acoustical level of 20dB(A).
At 27.2 dB(A), this drive is almost one of the quieter drives we have tested and the results are just exceptional for a 10k RPM product. While the numbers indicate a very quiet drive at idle, the subjective take indicates a drive that has the slightest of whirling noise not present in the current 7200RPM 2.5" notebook drives. At load, this drive finishes in the middle of our test group. Like its predecessor, you know the drive is working during seek operations but the sound pressure is definitely muted. Unfortunately, our drive developed a slight clanking noise and we could not complete AAM testing on the drive.
Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives as reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.6 utility. We also utilize thermal sensors and infrared measurement devices to verify our utility results. We test our drives in an enclosed case environment. Our base temperature level in the room at the time of testing is 25C.
By way of its reduced power dissipation, the VelociRaptor leads our test group in both idle and load thermals even though its platters are spinning away at 10k RPM. We are still running thermal tests with and without the IcePAK chassis (do not try this at home as it will void your warranty). Western Digital's internal testing showed a 7.1C drop in temperature with the IcePAK system under normal operating conditions. We measured a 5.1C drop with the chassis attached without active cooling and an 8.2C reduction in temps with airflow across the chassis. This indicates to us that operation without the IcePAK will be fine in the enterprise market.
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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.