Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB 10K RPM Hard Drive Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] For as long as WD's 10K RPM Raptor (now VelociRaptor) drives have existed, they've drawn enthusiasts in thanks to their favorable blend of space and performance. Though popular in the enterprise, 10K RPM hard drives have remained uncontested in the desktop space ever since the launch of the original Raptor, a 36GB model released in 2003. But with the boon of the solid-state drive, the future for drives like the VelociRaptor became questionable. However, as we can see now, the progression of SSD development isn't quite as rapid as we thought it'd be, in terms of $ per gigabyte. And when consumers are in need of mass storage, it's unrealistic to consider a full SSD solution, and that doesn't look to change for quite some time - if ever. So what about those who have need for both huge storage and great performance? That's the segment where WD's VelociRaptor drives reign supreme - even more so now with a 1TB model. VR drives have always been quite a bit faster than traditional 7,200 RPM hard drives, so with a 1TB option, there's ample room for those 30GB games and 100GB video projects. With its latest VR drives, WD has filled a segment it calls "Workstation". This implies that these aren't just drives for enthusiasts and gamers, but also the creative professional. As mentioned above, VR drives deliver a great blend of performance, storage space and also price, and the current crop of drives don't look to change a thing. At the same time, WD has said that in some cases, current VR drives can even out-perform SSDs, thanks to their fine-tuned design. Compared to the previous generation of drives, the latest models are "more than" 25% faster, and despite it being well-known that hard drives can sometimes buckle under huge loads, WD is confident that its VR drives can stand up to the challenge. To help gain a better idea of how the latest VR drives compare to WD's other current offerings, let's check out this table: Model Storage Speed Cache SATA Warranty VelociRaptor 250GB - 1TB 10,000 RPM 64MB 6Gbit/s 5-year Caviar Black 500GB - 2TB 7,200 RPM 32MB - 64MB 3Gbit/s & 6Gbit/s 5-year Caviar Blue 80GB - 1TB 7,200 RPM 16MB - 64MB 3Gbit/s & 6Gbit/s 2-year Caviar Green 320GB - 3TB ~5,300 RPM 8MB - 32MB 3Gbit/s & 6Gbit/s 2-year Like most hard drive vendors (a list that is condensing fast), WD doesn't offer actual performance numbers on the official website. Instead, all we're told is that the VR utilizes a SATA 6Gbit/s interface - which at this point in time is a given. Instead, we'll have to figure out those performance numbers for ourselves with the help of our test suite. It's sometimes difficult to get specific information as to what sort of change was made to increase performance, but WD promises that all aspects of its VR model has been looked at. The firmware has been fine-tuned to enable excellent read and write speeds across the entire drive and handle huge workloads with ease. And of course, one of the best aspects of VR drives is the focus on reliability, so it's no surprise to find them equipped with a 5-year warranty (the Caviar Black also belongs to this exclusive club). With that all covered, let's move onto a quick look at our testing methodology and then get right into our benchmarking results. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Test System & Methodology] At Techgage, we strive to make sure our results are as accurate and real-world applicable as possible. We list most of the steps and processes involved in setting up and conducting our benchmarking process below, but in the interests of brevity we can't mention every last detail. If there is any pertinent information that we've inadvertently omitted or you have any thoughts, suggestions, or critiques, then please feel free to email us or post directly in our forums. This site exists for readers like you and we value your input. The table below lists the hardware used in our current storage-testing machine, which remains unchanged throughout all of our testing with the exception of the storage device. Each drive used for the sake of comparison is also listed here. If the machine seems overkill for HDD testing - it is. It also doubles as our GPU testing rig. Component Techgage Hard Drive Drive Test System Processor Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition - Six-Core @ 4.20GHz - 1.375v Motherboard GIGABYTE G1. Assassin 2 - F4E BIOS (12/12/2011) Memory Corsair Dominator GT 16GB DDR3-2133 9-11-12-27, 1.60v Graphics GeForce GTX 680 2GB (Reference) - GeForce 301.42 Audio Onboard Creative X-Fi Storage OS Drive: Kingston HyperX 240GB SATA 6Gbit/s SSD Testing Drives: Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB (WD1000DHTZ, 10K RPM) Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB (WD2002FAEX, 7.2K RPM) Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB (WD20EARS, ~5.3K RPM) Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB (WD10EALX, 7.2K RPM) Power Supply Corsair AX1200 1200W Cooling Corsair H70 Self-Contained Liquid Cooler Chassis Cooler Master HAF X Full-Tower Et cetera Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit Our Windows 7 Desktop for HDD Testing (Photo Credit) When preparing our HDD testbed for benchmarking we follow these guidelines: General Guidelines Our CPU is frequency-locked to avoid potential performance variances. No power-saving options are enabled in the motherboard's EFI. AHCI is enabled in the motherboard's EFI for best performance. Only the Intel 6Gbit/s port controller is used for test drives. Only cold boots are utilized; for the purposes of our testing a boot is defined as the moment the power button is depressed to the moment the last systray icon and program has fully loaded after reaching the Windows 7 desktop. Auto-login is enabled. Windows 7 Optimizations User Account Control (UAC) is disabled. The OS is kept clean; no scrap files are left in between runs. The Windows Search daemon is disabled. Windows Update and OS power-saving settings are disabled. For our test suite, we've chosen a blend of both real-world and synthetic tests in order to get the best picture possible for overall drive performance. Although we value real-world performance higher than synthetic, synthetic tests are ideal because they give us the best case scenario of what a drive can do - and most often, the same tests can be run by you to be compared. Our synthetic benchmarks include Futuremark's PCMark 7, which has become synonymous with storage benchmarking, and also HD Tune Pro 5.0, Iometer 1.1.0 and AIDA64 2.30. For real-world testing, we perform both solid file and folder transfers, game level loading performance and also Windows 7 boot times. Note: While the Windows boot time test implies that the OS is installed on the hard drive, all other tests are performed when the drive is the target. For our HD Tune, AIDA64 and Iometer tests, the drive is left unpartitioned. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: PCMark 7] Futuremark's PCMark benchmarking suite should need no introduction - it's been a staple of PC benchmarking for the better half of a decade. PCMark offers a range of tests to gauge every aspect of a computer's performance and presents it in a neat simple final result. Thankfully, it also breaks down the overall score with individual subsystem scores (such as Memory, Storage, etc) in addition to given individual test results. As we're not too concerned with the performance of the PC as a whole, for our testing here we deselect all default tests and run only the "Secondary Storage" suite, with the hard drive in question as the chosen drive. Tests in this suite range from the loading of applications, running a Windows Defender scan, editing video, gaming and more. WD's 1TB VR drive is the clear winner here, but that isn't much of a surprise. I wouldn't go as far as to say it leaves the Caviar Black in the dust, but for those looking for ultimate performance in a hard drive, it seems clear so far that there is just one option (RAID 0 aside, of course). [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Synthetic: HD Tune Pro 5.0 & Iometer 1.1.0] One of the best-known storage benchmarking tools is HD Tune, as it's easy to run, covers a wide-range of testing scenarios, and can do other things such as test for errors, give SMART information and so forth. For our testing with the program, we run the default benchmark which gives us a minimum, average and maximum read speed, along with an access time result. Given its rotational boost, it was expected that the VR drive could push a far higher throughput than the Caviar Black, but what's most impressive is the access time - at under 7ms. Access time is the biggest bottleneck on mechanical hard drives with regards to multi-tasking and loading data, so to drop from 11.5ms to 6.8ms is impressive. It's even more impressive when you compare it to the Caviar Blue. Iometer 1.1.10. Originally developed by Intel, and since given to the open-source community, Iometer (pronounced "eyeawmeter", like thermometer) is one of the best storage-testing applications available, for a couple of reasons. The first, and primary, is that it's completely customizable, and if you have a specific workload you need to hit a drive with, you can easily accomplish it here. Also, the program delivers results in IOPS (input/output operations per second), a common metric used in enterprise and server environments. The level of customization cannot be understated. Aside from choosing the obvious figures, like chunk sizes, you can choose the percentage of the time that each respective chunk size will be used in a given test. You can also alter the percentages for read and write, and also how often either the reads or writes will be random (as opposed to sequential). We're just touching the surface here, but what's most important is that we're able to deliver a consistent test on all of our drives, which increases the accuracy in our results. Because of the level of control Iometer offers, we've created profiles for three of the most popular workloads out there: Database, File Server and Workstation. Database uses chunk sizes of 8KB, with 67%...

Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB 10K RPM Hard Drive Review

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Rob Williams