Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite
by Gary Key on April 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Vantage Once Again
The WD VelociRaptor drive generates excellent scores in the PCMark Vantage tests that simulate real-world performance patterns utilizing a variety of actual applications. We added in our Mtron Pro SSD 32GB drive as a comparison. While PCMark Vantage utilizes actual applications for testing, the HD test provides a pure performance look at the hard drive or controller tested. Like our previous testing with iPEAK, the results show the capabilities of the hard drive without the platform penalty. In other words, these tests will indicate the true performance capability of the hard disk and should provide an indication of the drive's performance potential within the platform.
The question now is, how well does the VelociRaptor hold up in actual applications with early firmware? Let's look at our early results. For those who need high synthetic benchmark results, you can skip the rest of this article. Buy an SSD if you can afford it, and if not, buy this drive.
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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.