Benchmark Results: 4 KB Random Read/Write Performance And Streaming Read/Write Performance

The Velociraptor at this price is simply not workable for me and for most people. For the cost of 1TB and some money saved, one can buy a good 120GB SSD and a Seagate 3TB. Seagate 3TB is not in the charts but I bet it will be only 10% slower than Velociraptor. This solution smokes out Raptor as a boot device and nearly matches it as a storage device.

Even on a standalone basis, for me Seagate 3TB at $145 and 85-90% of Raptor's performance makes more sense that Raptor 1TB at $300.

WD is living in a fools' world if they think that the premium they are charging on normal hard disks (because of `shortages') will be extendable to Raptor.

>mfw no ssd in comparison

Did you test it without the heat sink ?
What would be its temperature if you'd have done it ?
Could it fit into a performance desktop replacement notebook like a M18x or a Clevo mobile workstation ?

Where is the noise test? I bet anyone $1Million dollars, its louder than any SSD.

Yes, its a fast drive. It is most likely the last Raptor to ever be made. For video work, a typical 5400~7200RPM 2~3TB HD will do just fine. Can buy two 2TB drives + a 120Gb SSD for a tad bit more money... and still have a much quieter running system.

For the price you could get a 1TB drive and the Crucial Adrenaline 50GB and combo them for a 1TB+50GB SSD cache. Half the price and probably just as fast.

Why would I want an SSD in a gaming system? I need bulk capacity and this offers it in a fast package.

Damn that's a fast drive. Would make a great high performance scratch disk.

The market for these drives has certainly shrunk in the past few years, and I doubt many enthusiasts and gamers would even consider buying one anymore. It's value is limited to those who need more performance out of their storage devices than your typical 7200RPM 3.5" drive can deliver. Production pros working with large volumes of high res assets and complex project files would probably see the most benefit from a drive like this.

I'm just confused...what is this drive for? It would get absolutely destroyed by an OCZ Agility 3 240GB, which I've seen for $130, I think--$140 for sure.

If you're doing something where you specifically need 1TB of data accessible quickly all the time, this may have a niche, but it's a VERY SMALL niche. Almost everyone would find better performance paring a 240GB SSD with a 1TB HDD, using up 60GB on Intel's SRT, and 180GB for the SSD to be used as usual (Windows, programs, +60GB for projects/scratch).

Considering the 256GB Vertex 4 is at $165 and the 256GB M4 hits $150, I'm just completely puzzled by Western Digital throwing money into developing such a device.

No, the raptor is actually quite a bit further ahead than that, especially in random i/o, where it has as much as a 2x performance lead on the 3/4TB Barracuda XT's. Even in sequential reads/writes (generally the performance strong point of 7200RPM drives) it still has around a 50% performance advantage.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5729 [...] z-review/2

The enthusiasts already have SSD's for at least their boot drive (or the whole system like me), a few might consider those for "bulk" storage drives but beside that i doubt its much market for the drive sadly. It don't no matter how impressive it is as a mechanical drive because it cannot compete with the SSD's. Still remember the first raptor, darn was it fast compared to the HDD's of that time before the SSD's came and change everything.

i think the power consumption tests should include the total consumption of the system. If the drive itself takes lesser power, but because the whole system is in an active state while data is read/written, the overall total system energy consumption increases.

I see a lot of people missing the point here.

I completely agree that for people like us, an SSD+cheap storage drive is the way to go, but i don't think we're the target market.

If you're a pro into a lot of content creation, be it video or 3D animation/rendering stuff, this IS the drive for you, IMO. I mean, you could pair up a 256GB SSD as your OS+productivity suit drive, with a few of these drives for the actual work. Would save a lot of time and money, plus be low on power consumption. Power consumption is a bonus for RAID configs.

Seriously, find me an affordable 1TB SSD that you can RAID?

Yes this is not as fast as an SSD, but it is not designed to compete with SSDs.

This drive is much more reliable than any SSD out there. And will absolutely be magical if you put them in a large RAID array if you need tons of space on fast disks. Yes you can put 8x 240GB SSDs in RAID, but that will give you just under 2Tb of space (RAID0) and performance bottlenecked by the RAID controller.

I for one will use these in a NAS that requires large storage space used by multiple users.

It is realy a great drive for some specific uses (Use this for video editing output or scratch disk, ...) but this is indeed a niche market and it will continue to schrink over time.
For most people, a SSD/HDD combination will work much better and and those who need fast and large storage in a laptop can't use this anyway (this is where hybrid drives shine).

I would really like to see this new Velocity raptor as an hyprid HD. It is fast and small SSD part would make it faster. Maybe it would then be too expensive, I don't know, but even Velocity is not as fast as SSD disk are, it is very reliable and robust drive. My big modded games run from older 600 Gb velocity and I am guite happy with the loading speeds. I am going to upgrade the system disk to SSD during the next year, but I think that I will leave that old and obsolete war horse to run those huge games...

"Combining high performance and high reliability, the disk should be well-suited for applications like professional office machines, rendering boxes, high-end video and picture editing, small servers, and enthusiast-oriented desktops in need of a fast hard disk."

Rendering boxes don't need fast hard disks, they read data and save their frames over the network to your workstation or server.

"We measured the minimum sequential write performance of the new VelociRaptor at 114 MB/s, which can be an absolutely critical number in applications that rely on fast write performance, like digital recording of multiple high-definition video streams."

uncompressed 10-bit YUV (4:2:2 video):
1280x720 @ 60p - 141 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 24PsF - 127 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 60i - 158 MB/s

uncompressed RGB (4:4:4 video):
1280x720 @ 60p - 211 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 24PsF - 190 MB/s
1920x1080 @ 60i - 237MB/s

These drives are still not enough to write one stream of uncompressed HD, much less multiple streams.

The lack of a budget 256GB SSD in benches for comparison, renders this article, well, uninteresting.

no, not even close. the 50gb ssd only cashes 50gb, the raptor is more for storage needs, and large storage/scratch disc at a budget price (a comparable ssd size wise would cost 1000$ or 600 if you are willing to raid 0 4 bargan deal 256 drives.)

the 50gb cashe is great for normal users, but people who would use a VelociRaptor are not normal.




you would want it as a boot, trust me when i say that moving my boot off a hdd make that hdd close to 1000 times more responsive, take into account my hdd was hammered so hard that it wasn't even getting 1mb a second at times. now its back into the 90-120 range where it should be.




at the same time, i could argue for getting a quad channel motherboard fill it with 8gb ram sticks, get 8-16 gb set aside for system memory, the other 48-56gb as a ram disc and a pci ssd for a secondary scratch disc and run off storage.

we are talking a professional level though, not a popular youtube or podcast level.




same here, i just cant see the use in this... well i can see the use, but its not THAT much faster than other hdds anymore, they use to be blazeingly fast, i remember quake 3 arena took a long time to load on a standard hdd back in the day, than the screensavers showed us a 10krpm drive load it, and it was night and day difference, i mean right now, looking at the load times of hdd compared to an ssd, that impressive, but back in the day, a 5krpm or a 7krpm compared to the 10krpm... my god... the load difference was even greater than what we see with ssds today, and let me prefface that with what we SEE, yea i know they are many MANY times faster, but loading a level in a game is where most people can see the difference.

but today, there isnt even much of a difference between a 7200 rpm over a 10krpm.




good point, and if the thing finds and gets crap done faster, it may come out as using less overall energy.




if you look for deals, you could get a 1tb raid of 250gb drives, or at least in that range, and you would get about 2000 read and write from that, not sure of the io bonuses, but i assume that it would be there. and having that in a raid 5 i believe for redundancy, would out preform most of what you want.

if i remember correctly, star wars star destroyer, in the new movies, was either 1tb or 1pb (i believe it was tb) for the fully modeled version, i forget which. so unless you are working with bigger more detailed models, or working with completely raw footage, my 700$ solution would be so significantly better than the that there would be little reason to even consider the VelociRaptor as an option.

I seriously doubt it was either 1 TB or 1 PB... probably more like 1 GB...