WD's New Raptor Drive Is a Bird of Prey!
Table of contents
- 1. The VelociRaptor Bites!
- 2. Hard Drive Basics
- 3. Hard Drive Performance Basics
- 4. Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150 (WD3000GLFS)
- 5. Drive Performance
- 6. One Drive, Multiple Applications
- 7. Drive Comparison Tables
The Velociraptor was a small, carnivorous dinosaur, well known to the public since the first Jurassic Park movie. Although it was oversized in the movie and its teamwork abilities are in dispute, using the dinosaur’s name, which in Latin means "swift thief", appears to be a really smart move for hard drive manufacturer Western Digital. The company has produced a family of excellent enthusiast hard drives for years - the Raptor - and the next generation strives for providing more capacity and better performance with radically changed physical dimensions.
While everybody expected a higher capacity and higher performance version of the Raptor (which is true), Western Digital went back to the drawing table and analyzed all characteristics for a high-end hard drive. The target was to create an enthusiast hard drive that had the reliability and performance to also satisfy the workstation and low-end server market, and to make sure it can compete with Flash-based drives at least for the time being. Professional server storage applications are currently moving from the 3.5" to the 2.5" form factor, while desktop hard drives will stay at 3.5" for the predictable future. However, Western Digital found a nice way to combine the best of both worlds.
The clear cover of the second generation WD Raptor-X is gone. But the step from the Raptor-X to the VelociRaptor involved a change of the physical form factor, as the new VelociRaptor now is a 2.5" hard drive. While this doesn’t enable new transfer rate records or truly high capacities, 2.5" drives typically offer much improved access time with still excellent transfer rates. At the same time, thermal power loss and high drive temperatures are less of an issue with decreasing physical dimensions. The new VelociRaptor, aka WD3000GLFS, offers a maximum capacity of 300 GB and still utilizes the SATA interface, because SAS - despite its flexible feature set - would introduce clearly higher cost at little benefit for the end user. The interface now supports SATA at 3 Gb/s link speed (300 MB/s), while the prior Raptors were limited to 150 MB/s (which has never been an issue, by the way).
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Athauglas......on page 5 is the drive with the top plate removed..not with a clear window.
*drools*
Very nice and about time. Now, who has $300 to lend me.
LAME as all hell...mant new 320gb/platter drives are almost as fast with a lot better capacity and surely price.. ! This is like a raptor ME edition...zzzz
#1 - Finally! Tom's Seems to have gotten a scoop. It's been a while but it's nice to See Tom's have a major hardware review out before the others.
#2 - A very well written article. I've noticed an uptick in the quality of articles of late. Kudos again.
#3 - A very nice HDD. Something I may definitely look at adding to my system.
LAME as all hell...mant new 320gb/platter drives are almost as fast with a lot better capacity and surely price.. ! This is like a raptor ME edition...zzzz
Oh really, which ones?
western digital 640 aaks series b3 revision:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136218
Seagate 7200.11 (if they can work out their doa prob):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822148316
A few of samsung's F1 spinpoints...
they are all pretty close, especially seagate at 114mb STR, 60 low and around 100 average across 320 gigs.
A 150 gig drive that is just a bit higher is not so awesome, and yes I know seek times, IO and all that matter too. Do you really thonk the new raptor is gonna be 90 bucks like these, I sure don't.
If they at least have a 320 same performance, or the performance was closer to 150 (as in a larger 3.5 platter), then sure, but it's sad considering a 7200 is almost passing them ALREADY.
My bad, 300 gb does make it look beter ! but still those other drives are way to close considering this is the raptor series.
Well you answered it yourself i.e., seek and IO. You can't take read / write as the total picture. The drives you posted aren't really that close in read / write either. I'm sure you know the last bit of performance costs the most money.
You could say you don't think it's worth the cash, I have no problem with that, but it sounds a lot like sour grapes to me.
Seriously. Just what about this drive isn't impressive?
It has twice the storage space of the previous top model.
It has better benchmark results.
It runs cooler way cooler.
That IcePack is perfect for mounting behind front intake fans(improved airflow).
I'd want 1 over any 1TB drive. The price is also quite reasonable for a Raptor.
I'd call that progress in every way.
There's just no pleasing some people.
Honestly, who was expecting the next Raptor to be a 2.5 inch drive? I know it's in a 3.5 inch enclosure, but you just know the guys at Alienware are trying to figure out how one of these is going to work in a laptop.
About time they updated the raptors, they've been doing pretty poorly for quite a while. It's cool to see over 120MB/s read/write on a desktop drive.
I wonder why I/O performance isn't as good as the SAS drives even though it has faster read/write speeds and latency. Could this be fixed with firmware?
They look like a really nice answer to SSDs. I'm really considering getting one but $300 for a hard drive is a lot of money.
Hell, it'd be the most expensive component in my rig...
Honestly, who was expecting the next Raptor to be a 2.5 inch drive? I know it's in a 3.5 inch enclosure, but you just know the guys at Alienware are trying to figure out how one of these is going to work in a laptop.
Notebook HDs only need 5V and the velociRaptor needs both 12V and 5V. I'm not saying it can't be done.
It's not sour grapes...it's spoon feeding us tiny bumps and calling it amazing that gets me...it's better, but amazing or wow or making a big deal about an incremental increase is just hyping it up, when it's not that big of a step up.
Lets see how it looks to me:
- I get 30%+ of performance increase compared to my 1TB drive (yah, 10EACS)
- I get 300gb for $300, I already have 1000gb for $300
- I can get 640gb instead of 300gb with little speed decrease but it will cost $130.
So 30%+ speed increase equals almost 5x price increase? My wallet thinks otherwise... But thats my wallet, if your wallet says otherwise, I think you'll be happy with the new HDD from WD
^My wallet says I have to live with my Raptor, you know bills and stuff.
It's not sour grapes...it's spoon feeding us tiny bumps and calling it amazing that gets me...it's better, but amazing or wow or making a big deal about an incremental increase is just hyping it up, when it's not that big of a step up.
Hard drives have to live within the laws of physics and current technology. Maybe you know of some way to get a 200% improvement. By all means share it with us.
This drive looks good to me. If I hadn't just built a new computer, I'd like one of these in it. One might end up in the new computer anyway. Don't know, will see.
Hey wait, that government rebate check could pay for one of these and not hurt the wallet at all.