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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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.