Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
HD Tune Pro 3.00
In our read tests, the VelociRaptor just runs (flies) away from the Raptor in the sustained transfer rate tests. The average transfer rate of 98.4 MB/s is about 36% faster than the 150GB drive, while burst rates improve 61% and access time by 18%. However, all is not well with our drive. Thanks to early firmware, the servo algorithms are not optimized, resulting in drastic slowdowns on the outer diameter of the platter area.
This resulted in several problems with our benchmark test suite. The consistency and validity of benchmark results did not meet our variation requirements during testing. The synthetic benchmarks typically generated results close to what WD is estimating with the final firmware results. However, our application benchmarks tell another story, especially those that have a high rate of sustained transfer activity.
In our write speed tests, we see a familiar pattern. The VelociRaptor offers a maximum write speed that is 26% faster, average write speed is 42% quicker, and burst rates are once again about 61% better. We consistently had a drop off at the beginning of the drive (the outer tracks on the platter) and it will be corrected with the final firmware revision before the drives ship.
We will expand the results of our file benchmarks in the full review. For the time being, we are showing how the two drives compare to each other with a file length of 32KB.
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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.