Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB 10K RPM Hard Drive Review

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by Rob Williams on June 20, 2012 in Storage

Need big storage, but can’t compromise on performance? At a time when 1TB SSDs cost as much as an excellent gaming PC, the obvious choice becomes WD’s VelociRaptor – which not only recently received a refresh, but also a 1TB model. Let’s take a look at it, and see how it compares to WD’s other current desktop hard drives.

Page 5 – Synthetic: AIDA64 2.30

Similar to HD Tune, AIDA64’s built-in disk benchmarker is one of the easiest to run. The developer also keeps up on top of architectural trends so that you feel confident that the algorithms don’t get much better than this. This spreads beyond the storage benchmark, as AIDA64’s system stress-testers is one of the best, if not the best, out there – thanks to it being able to take full advantage of any given CPU architecture.

For our testing, we run both the read and write transfer suites. Because of the write test, we perform our benchmarking here on an unpartitioned drive.

AIDA64 2.30

The results here align extremely well to those we gained with HD Tune. The VR drive has impressive throughput performance, with its minimum MB/s almost matching the middle-of-the-road for the Caviar Black.

It might not seem obvious, but an important factor with hard drives – and storage in general – is how fast it can randomly grab or place data. Here, we can see that the VR drive performs quite a bit better than the rest, although the results aren’t quite as impressive as the straight read tests seen in the first graph.

The theme continues with the write test, although I’d argue the results are even more impressive – though also a little bit odd. It mystifies me how the Blue out-performed the Black in the minimum write test, but the Black made up for it later. Also odd is the Green’s average surpassing the Black’s, but this was a repeatable result. Where averages are concerned though, nothing can touch the VR.

Much like our HD Tune test once again, the VR drive dips below 7ms according to AIDA64, offering a huge performance gain over all of the other drives.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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