Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB

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by William Kelley on May 24, 2010 in Storage

Solid-state may be the future of our storage, but for now, the prices for the latest SSD’s (even value models) is still far too high on the $/GB scale. For those looking for mass storage and still-great speeds, mechanical storage is still on top, and WD’s latest VelociRaptor’s, which utilize SATA 3.0, sit comfortably above all the rest.

Page 5 – Real-World: File Transfers, 7-Zip Archiving

From a storage standpoint, two of the most common scenarios for almost all computer users include copying a file from one place to another, and also archiving a folder for storage (as in backup, or portability). We tackle both of these here on this page. For our real-world transfers, we take a 4GB file and also a 4GB folder, one at a time, and copy it from one place to another on the same drive. Our 4GB folder includes 4,800 files, which we consider to be a realistic number for a media folder of that density. Included inside are numerous documents, music, photos and other miscellaneous files.

For our archiving test, we are using the excellent open-sourced 7-Zip, as it’s lightweight, feature-rich, and fast. Our test consists of us taking the same 4GB folder as mentioned above, and archiving it to a .7z format using the program’s default settings.

Real-World File Transfer

7-Zip Archiving

Real world testing once again shows the Seagate drives are still able to edge out the win by a fair margin in file transfers and 7-Zip archiving. Seagate has the advantage and you’ll need to keep this in mind when forming your overall opinion.

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