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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DeepThought86 - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
Why oh why do you people insist on using new benchmarks all the time? How stupid is it that I can't go to your review of the Seagate 500GB from just last year and be able to compare performance with this new Velociraptor.Zak - Sunday, April 27, 2008 - link
Hm, so I guess this is not going to fit in a Mac Pro due to non-standard connector position. I bet there will be 3rd party replacements, but will this void the warranty?Z,
mvrx - Thursday, April 24, 2008 - link
I still find it strange that a drive only has 32MB of cache.. I'd think a gig or two would be on some high end drives..Xean - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
Is it suitable for laptops?strikeback03 - Wednesday, April 23, 2008 - link
As they mentioned, only ones that accept unusually tall 2.5 inch drives.Fricardo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
What happened to the hard drive review article that was supposed to come out a month or so ago? I'd really like to see a full comparison, especially of the new WD and Samsung drives.Deusfaux - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
#1. Tech Report says:"Western Digital says it's also working on a single-platter version of the drive, but that's not ready yet."
Gary can you verify this one way or another? What would the timeframe be?
#2. I have a couple spike drops when I bench one of my 2 Raptors with HDTach/HDTune. They're not right at the start, but they're there all the same.
What do they mean? I don't have them on my other Raptor.
Araemo - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
Haven't all raptors(and indeed, most 10k and 15k rpm drives) used 2.5" platters in their large casings? I thought that most/all high-end drive manufacturers used 2.5" platters due to the high angular velocities and vibration.In that case - the smaller drive size shouldn't have any negative impact on performance at all.
GhandiInstinct - Tuesday, April 22, 2008 - link
In 2008, for their next generation Raptor, only 16MB Cache?CK804 - Monday, April 28, 2008 - link
Do people read anymore? The explanation is given on the second page: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.