Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
When Smaller is Better
| Specification | |||
| WD
VelociRaptor WD3000BLFS |
Western Digital
Raptor WD1500ADFD |
Western Digital
Raptor WD740ADFD |
|
| Capacity | 300GB | 150GB | 74GB |
| Interface | SATA 3 Gb/s | SATA 1.5 Gb/s | SATA 1.5 Gb/s |
| Rotational Speed | 10,000 RPM | 10,000 RPM | 10,000 RPM |
| Buffer Size | 16 MB | 16 MB | 16 MB |
| Average Latency | 2.99 ms (nominal) | 2.99 ms (nominal) | 2.99 ms (nominal) |
| Read Seek Time | 4.2 ms | 4.6 ms | 4.6 ms |
| Write Seek Time | 4.7 ms | 5.2 ms (average) | 5.2 ms (average) |
| Transfer Rate Buffer to Disk |
120 MB/s (sustained) | 84 MB/s (sustained) | 84 MB/s (sustained) |
| Number of Heads | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Number of Platters | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing | Native Command Queuing |
| Acoustics - WD Spec | Idle - 29dBA Seek Mode 0 - 36dBA |
Idle - 29dBA Seek Mode 0 - 36dBA |
Idle - 29dBA Seek Mode 0 - 36dBA |
| Warranty | 5 - Years | 5 - Years | 5 - Years |
| Power Dissipation | |||
| Read/Write | 6.08 Watts | 10.02 Watts | 10.02 Watts |
| Idle | 4.53 Watts | 9.19 Watts | 9.19 Watts |
| Standby | 0.42 Watts | 2.66 Watts | 2.66 Watts |
| . | |||
The new VelociRaptor's 2.5" design utilizes two platters sporting 150GB each compared to the 74GB platter designs on the third generation product. These smaller higher areal density platters are beneficial in reducing the area the drive heads need to cover. This leads to an advantage in seek times and random access abilities of the drive when comparing it to its cousin, the Raptor WD1500ADFD.
We see a reduction in read seek times to 4.2ms and write seek times to 4.7ms. The one disadvantage is the drive's much smaller outer track diameter can potentially produce lower sequential transfers if not handled properly. Even with this potential pitfall, the drive's sustained transfer rates have increased from an estimated 84 MB/s to 120 MB/s.
Power dissipation improved across the board compared to the previous drive with a mere 6W or so needed to operate the drive during normal usage. Acoustic specifications remain the same, though this drive's noise characteristics are much improved, as we will see shortly.
While the hot option on the latest 750GB~1TB drives is a 32MB buffer, WD is once again staying the course with a highly optimized 16MB cache. WD states they did not see any advantages to a 32MB cache on this drive and instead spent their engineering resources on optimizing the cache algorithms.
The other big change is the move to a SATA 3GB/s interface from the older 1.5 GB/s setup on the previous generation drives. Although that was never a performance issue, it is nice to see the latest specifications on the marketing checklist. Western Digital claims a MTBF rating of 1.4 million hours and provides their standard enterprise warranty period of five years.
Pricing is estimated at $300 for the VelociRaptor and the drive will be available in retail channels in the latter part of May. If you just cannot wait, Alienware will build you a system utilizing this drive starting next week. Western Digital has discussed the possibility of additional drives in the family utilizing single-platter designs based upon market demand. Our question was if the capacity could be increased; we did not get an answer, but we did detect a smirk from our contact.
The 2.5" form factor that WD utilizes is 15mm thick compared to the standard 9mm option found in the majority of notebooks. This means the drive will not work in the majority of notebooks available today, although we would not be surprised to see a DTR design utilizing this drive in the high-end market. However, the form factor matches that of Seagate's Savvio enterprise drives and should easily plug and play where those drives are utilized.
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OldWorlder - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Yes, that's always a good advice to have a system and work partition that is rather small (with some defrag from time to time) at the beginning of a disk!But there's also no need to "not use" the rest, as long as the files there are not accessed too often - mine seems to fill up faster than I can increase it with the next bigger disk while system/work stays constantly at 70G...
7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Would WD rush this product to reviewers and OEM's if the firmware was this poor? I mean honestly, you can tell this has the potential to be an outstanding product, but this is a PR nightmare. I'm willing to bet not all review sites are going to re-review once updated firmware comes out, and right now while it does quite well in the simulated benchmarks, it falls on its face during real-world applications.It's one thing to rush software out the door and patch later (or even hardware's software drivers), completely another when you do this with firmware.
I feel bad for the engineers, because I'm sure they were begging for another couple weeks to get the bugs out...
imaheadcase - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
It appears to be only a few sites with bad ones, storagereview.com review shows no issue.7Enigma - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
How would only a few sites get a particular firmware version and others not? I understand this particular model might have a hardware issue, but its the firmware that I thought was the cause for performance issues.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I dont know either, but other sites are not having this issue. check out storagereview.com for a complete review.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Rather I should say read any or all of the other reviews...Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150
@ StorageReview
@ TechReport
@ HotHardware
@ PCPer
@ LegitReviews
No-one else seems to have any issues, although the incomplete firmware is mentioned.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
And this is why we state several times that we are calling this a preview and will withhold final judgment until we receive a new test drive. Clearly, the drive we were sent has some problems. They may be firmware related, or we may have a drive that has firmware + hardware problems. Maybe the firmware needs tuning to address a certain subset of drives that exhibit the poor performance characteristics we discovered. Whatever the case, we will have a full follow-up review in the near future.retrospooty - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
cool... I look forward to it.Zefram0911 - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
I know removing the heatsink voids the warranty... but will the SATA and SATA power hookups match a hot swappable 3.5'' bay if the heatsink is removed? I know there would be an inch of extra space or so, but I'd like to keep my hotswap bay.johnsonx - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
While I don't know for sure, I will say NO, at least not without some creative rigging.