Posts Tagged ‘hard drive’
Following is my experiences with WD’s updated 10,000RPM HDD.
First off, this drive is noticeable when operating, even in an Antec 1200 case. That shouldn’t matter though: the consumers who are usually purchasing one of these drives care more about performance than it dB level. For my comparison I used HD Tune Pro 3.5 and ran the read and random access benchmarks against the Velociraptor (300GB) and my previous system drive, WD’s Caviar Blue (640GB). With it’s built in heatsink, the Vrap also runs cooler than the Caviar. During my benchmarks, the Vrap ran from 21-22°C as opposed to the 24°C temperature of the Blue.
One final item of note: the Raptor drive is obviously going to outperform the Caviar. These benchmarks are not intended to showcase that the Raptor is the better drive (which it is), but to show the performance gains I achieved by installing it in my system.
Pre-Benchmark Comparison (advertised specs)
| VelociRaptor | Caviar Blue | |
| Brand | Western Digital | Western Digital |
| Series | VelociRaptor | Caviar Blue |
| Model | WD3000HLFS | WD6400AAKS |
| Interface | SATA 3.0Gb/s | SATA 3.0Gb/s |
| Capacity | 300GB | 640GB |
| RPM | 10000 RPM | 7200 RPM |
| Cache | 16MB | 16MB |
| Average Seek Time | 4.2ms | - |
| Average Write Time | 4.7ms | - |
| Average Latency | 3ms | - |
Velociraptor Benchmarks
Read Benchmark:
Random Access:
Caviar Blue Benchmarks:
Read:
Random Access:
Comparisons:
Read:
| Min. Xfer Rate | Max. Xfer Rate | Average | Access Time | Burst Rate | |
| VelociRaptor | 70.7 MB/sec | 124.8MB/sec | 98.5 MB/sec | 7.3ms | 186.7 MB/sec |
| Caviar Blue | 51.9 MB/sec | 109.2 MB/sec | 88.3 MB/sec | 11.9 ms | 141.9 MB/sec |
Random Access:
| VelociRaptor | Caviar Blue | VelociRaptor | Caviar Blue | VelociRaptor | Caviar Blue | |
| operations/sec | avg. access time | avg. speed | ||||
| 512 bytes | 132 IOPS | 84 IOPS | 7.6ms | 11ms | 0.065 MB/s | 0.041 MB/s |
| 4 KB | 132 IOPS | 83 IOPS | 7.6ms | 11ms | 0.516 MB/s | 0.326 MB/s |
| 64 KB | 123 IOPS | 79 IOPS | 8.1ms | 12ms | 7.749 MB/s | 4.951 MB/s |
| 1 MB | 43 IOPS | 42 IOPS | 22ms | 23ms | 43.681 MB/s | 42.392 MB/s |
| Random | 68 IOPS | 55 IOPS | 14ms | 18ms | 34.434 MB/s | 27.648 MB/s |
Comments:
Again, this review wasn’t to pit the Blue and Raptor against each other, just to show the performance gains available to someone in need of an enterprise-class HDD. The Caviar Black would be a HDD worth pitting against the Raptor.
RoastedToast is back again with a brand-new look and feel!
2010 brings yet another engine powering the site: Wordpress. Previous blogging engines used were (most recently) Blogger, Joomla, Drupal and various others. Let’s hope that Wordpress is the new way to go.
Upcoming posts include a review of Western Digital’s Velociraptor hard drive (model HLFS).