WD's New Raptor Drive Is a Bird of Prey!

I/O Benchmark Results

The VelociRaptor does really well in the low-level benchmarks, but it cannot beat the 2.5" SAS drives. These are optimized for I/O heavy applications, and they perform significantly better than the VelociRaptor. However, we’re comparing the new 2.5" VelociRaptor with the best-of-class enterprise drives, which may be up to twice as expensive. WD’s new Raptor still delivers 20-30% better I/O performance than the 3.5" predecessor, the Raptor-X, and it is still significantly faster than any other 3.5" SATA hard drive, which should be kept in mind when looking at the I/O performance diagrams.

For those who don’t know how to read it: The first value shows the maximum number of I/O operations per second when individual commands are inserted; and the values to the right were determined using larger command queue depths, which means that 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 different commands are pending (remember NCQ - Native Command Queuing). The four diagrams represent four different I/O performance profiles: Database, file server, web server and workstation. They differ in the distribution of reads and writes and block size. Databases require more reads than writes, and the blocks are typically small. Web servers only require high read I/O performance. Workstations are somewhat balanced across the parameters and fileservers often handle larger blocks.