WD VelociRaptor VR150 300GB

[Berek]

It has been another couple of years since the latest Raptor release and we finally receive word on the next WD Raptor... the "VelociRaptor", with an increase in capacity set initially to 300GB, along with apparent significant increases in performance, and a new cooling system (and add all that together, price too).

One of the slowest bottlenecks in a system to this day continues to be the hard drive. Even SSDs have yet to reach certain performance benefits of HD's (mainly in write times), although they are closing the gap rapidly. WD's Raptor line is at the forefront of performance in hard drives, especially when it comes to seek times and accessing a variety of data as quickly as possible.

Anyone care to wager whether this will be significant in the face of continuing performance benefits from drives such as WD's own 640GB SE16? I see the Raptors increasingly focused on access times (a very important sector nonetheless), as this seems to be the only significant performance advantage over other areas of a drives capabilities compared to other offerings.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=459.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html
http://anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=432
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/21/wd-speeds-velociraptor
http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6953&Itemid=1

I would be particularly interested in this drive for game loading/swapping purposes and general app loading purposes (seek times excel here). Most of my other storage content, such as: music, movies, and various backup files, will either be static, too insignificant to care what HD it is on, or simply require better transfer rates than access times to manage. It may also benefit having the swap file on, and other small-file/seek-intensive application scenarios.

As usual with a beast on the horizon, I shiver at the price, which is currently pegged at $299.99. I'm wondering if the WD SE16 640GB at about $119.99 is still the ultimate champion. Ultimately, I have a hard time swallowing almost 3x the price (and less than half the storage space) for a few instances of seconds shaved off of performance numbers.

 

[Albuquerque]

I dunno, I'm not really impressed. In fact, even when they were the fastest thing on the desktop, I still wasn't impressed. I could be ~15% slower for half the power, heat and noise and less than half the cost.

I guess ultimately it's the difference between the folks who buy an Intel "Extreme" chip versus the next-step-down version. The 2x pricetag for the slight speed increase just doesn't appeal to me. At least in the processor space it might make sense as you could potentially overclock it further... But in storage devices? Not really.

 

[suryad]

Fair point Albuquerque but I want...in RAID 0...then I could just move my raptors as backup/storage I dont know there is just something about having reaaaallly fast components in a computer.

 

[Albuquerque]

Fair point Albuquerque but I want...in RAID 0...then I could just move my raptors as backup/storage I dont know there is just something about having reaaaallly fast components in a computer.

I don't think these will be faster than one of the new two-platter WD640GB drives that are now available, even if paired in RAID. Seek time is interesting and does count for something, but the transfer performance is pretty "meh" IMO. The 7200RPM PRT drives are just fantastic at read/write performance; enough so that they can typically beat out the Raptors in most desktop situations.

Hell, even the 1TB drives that are six months old are still able to outclass the Raptors in gaming, windows loading and streaming tests.

 

[suryad]

Interesting point Albuquerque, so if you had the budget to go for the fastest SATA raid setup which drives would you pick? Mind storage space is not a constraint in this case.

 

[Albuquerque]

Interesting point Albuquerque, so if you had the budget to go for the fastest SATA raid setup which drives would you pick? Mind storage space is not a constraint in this case.

If I had all that money, I'd go buy a set of 15KRPM SCSI drives and a half-decent SCSI controller and have it done with. I'd probably end up spending less money than the Raptor setup, and would probably end up with a faster drive system either way.

SATA is surely better than the PATA it replaced, but it's not THAT special to me. SCSI still has the upper hand in disk storage IMO...

 

[suryad]

http://www.maximumpc.com/sites/maxi...?back=article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever

I just read that...looks pretty fast to me!!

And that...http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=548&type=expert&pid=1

 

[Davros]

i know a lot of raptor owners arnt happy with the noise levels they put out

 

[suryad]

I am fine with the noise level. My speakers are running too loud anyways to hear that

 

[Rys]

i know a lot of raptor owners arnt happy with the noise levels they put out

I'm not sure why. I've got a pair of 150s, which are just 2 of the 6 disks I run, and I can't really hear them

I'm lusting after a pair of these new ones in the absence of affordable SSD. And if I'm classing $300/300GB as affordable, you know SSD has a way to go yet there.

Anyone want a pair of 150s? Only mildly abused on a daily basis

 

[pcchen]

From Storage Review's preview, it seems this "VelociRaptor" actually has lower idle noise than most SATA harddrives and requires less power. So the only problem now is the price.

 

[AlexV]

Anyone want a pair of 150s? Only mildly abused on a daily basis

Yes

 

[suryad]

I am so tempted to order those drives but the whole thought of installing the OS and all that is putting me off.

 

[I.S.T.]

techreport's got a review up.

 

[swaaye]

Seek noise with Raptors is obscene, IMHO. Especially when you install Vista and the damn OS grinds the drive for 8 hours doing its initial "optimization". There are 2 150 gig Raptors in my life, one at home and one in my boss's rig. I call it "rocks in a blender." They are so annoying in quieter environments that I suspended each of them with elastic cord in the drive bays. They are still louder than 7200 RPM drives, but much more acceptable this way.

I don't see myself buying another noisy drive again, honestly. The 7200RPM 500gig WDs I have are almost as fast and a hell of a lot quieter (obviously more capacious too!). Gonna stick to big 7200s and wait for SSDs that are quickly coming upon us now. Reduce those drive seek times by orders of magnitude. Make fragmentation almost a non-issue. So many advantages.

 

[AlphaWolf]

The velociraptor seems to be substantially more quiet (from the reviews) than the older ones. Although it still seems more loud than many other drives.

 

[Rainbow Man]

I don't see myself buying another noisy drive again, honestly.

Unfortunately this is unavoidable with a mechanical drive mechanism.

If you want a high performance actuator it needs to accelerate the heads quickly thus leading to quick abrupt starts and stops. This causes noise.

Silent drives by this measure are thus slow drives.

This new raptor thanks to being a native 2.5 inch unit (that's a surprise!) has smaller diameter disks and the heads will not need to travel such large distances. The actuator and its attached arms can also be built smaller and lighter. This will lead to less noise.

When it comes to transfer speed this is actually a quite unimportant measure for a storage device unless you constantly do a lot of very large file copies. A 2.5" drive with its smaller disks will have a lower linear velocity compared to a 3.5" disk leading to lower raw read/write numbers.

Howwevr most time when accessing a harddrive is not actually spent reading or writing. It's seeks that are the dominant factor due to being so abysmally slow. Hardware hgurus may complain about how many hundreds or maybe even thousands of cycles of wait states are caused by CPU cache misses or whatever.

That's absolutely nothing in comparison to the tme wasted waiting for a harddrive to seek and read a sector of critical data. The 12-14ms of typical real-world access time of a typical desktop harddrive is half an eternity from the computer's point of view.

Therefore a drive with 50% lowr access times would yield much greater performance boost than a drive with 50% faster transfer rates for the vast majority of operations.

I'll keep an eye open for this drive. It looks nice. I wouldn't mind sticking a few in my rig. Vibration is going to be much less of a problem than with 3.5" drives that's for sure.

OPeace.

 

[swaaye]

If you want a high performance actuator it needs to accelerate the heads quickly thus leading to quick abrupt starts and stops. This causes noise.

Silent drives by this measure are thus slow drives.

Yeah I know that's why they're loud. I've had 7200 RPM drives back in the '90s that were as loud as the loudest Raptor. The problem is that the speed boost by making them super quick doesn't really shockingly speed up the comp in comparison to the new 7200s out there. And they can't hold a candle to the access times (or silence) of a SSD. I'd like to see those take over finally here. I really like quietness.

 

[Rainbow Man]

It can't hold a candle in that regard perhaps but it's about ten times bigger than an affordable high-performance SSD. Capacity is nice too; there's not going to be an affordable 300GB SSD for a few years.

Only rarely can we keep the cake and eat it.
Peace.

 

[Davros]

you could allways get a hyperdrive
8000x faster at finding files than a 10,000 rpm SATA WD Raptor WD740ADFD
5500x faster at finding files than a 15,000 rpm SAS Seagate Savvio or Maxtor Atlas 15k II SAS drive
125x faster at serving files than a WD Raptor, certainly the fastest SATA drive on the market.
110x faster at serving files than any 15,000 rpm U320 SCSI or SAS drive.
700x faster at serving and receiving files than the latest Samsung laptop flash drives.
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/