Western Digital VelociRaptor: A Drive with a Bite

Let's get real now

We need to state once again that the press sample drives shipped with early firmware that is about 90% complete according to Western Digital. Their engineering group is working around the clock (we were up together until the wee hours last night) to finalize the firmware before the drives ship to Alienware or into the retail channel.

Western Digital was upfront about the state of the firmware and warned us that results might not represent the final product. We already discussed the firmware problems yesterday. In our case, it appears that besides being firmware challenged our drive might not have been the smartest or most capable of the pack either. We have returned our drive for analysis. In the meantime, our actual application results consist of benchmarks that certainly would expose the sustained transfer rate problems on the outer area of the platters.

Game Level Load

This test centers on the actual loading of a playable level within our game selections. Our application timer begins when the level load process is initiated and ends when the screen is visible.

In Company of Heroes, the separation between the mechanical drives is just over a second. Our VelociRaptor is the quickest mechanical drive in this test. In Crysis, we see the VelociRaptor trailing our leaders by just .2 seconds at most. These are objective tests centered on a single level load in each game. Subjectively, the two Raptors and our SSD drive seemed to offer quicker transitions' between levels as we extended the game play length.

Nero Recode

Our encoding test is quite easy - we take our original Office Space DVD and use AnyDVD to copy the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, thus providing an almost exact duplicate of the DVD. We then fire up Nero Recode 2, select our Office Space copy on the hard drive, and perform a shrink operation to allow the entire movie along with extras to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc. We leave all options on their defaults except we turn off the advanced analysis option. The scores reported include the full encoding process in seconds, with lower numbers indicating better performance. We delete each image after use.

We had a slight surprise in this test as the original Raptor finishes about two seconds ahead of our star. It was obvious watching the encode process that the VelociRaptor's time stumbled and stalled at the beginning of the test and then the drive made up ground quickly that allowed it to almost catch our previous mechanical champ. The Mtron SSD drive once again flexes its muscles.

WinRAR 3.71

Our WinRAR test measures the time it takes to compress our test folder that contains 444 files, 10 folders, and 602MB of data. While the benchmark is CPU intensive for the compression tests, it still requires a fast storage system to keep pace with the CPU. A drive that offers excellent write performance can make a difference in this benchmark.

This test relies on the CPU and the burst rate of the storage system. Our VelociRaptor finishes in third this time and trails the Samsung 750GB and WD 640GB offerings. Once again, at the beginning of the test the drive stumbled out of the gate and then finished strong.