Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Reviewed

Reviewer Experience and Testing
First, we did some synthetic benchmarks using ATTO and CrystalMark.

 

The speeds that we see here are faster than any other hard drive we've tested that wasn't an SAS drive. They even beat out our single drive Barracuda XT 2TB.

Here we can see that the read and write speeds on the VelociRaptor are very high, near or higher than some SSDs. As such, we expect this drive to beat out some SSDs in the real world testing. When compared to the Seagate RAID array, we notice that the Seagates only benefit in sequential read/write tests and if we were to run the VelociRaptor in RAID 0 they would be faster.

Next, we ran SiSandra hard disk test to compare against other drives. This just gave us a good comparison of the drive we ran against other drives in their databases. Looking at this, you can see that the WD Velociraptor is only slightly slower than the Seagate 15K RPM Cheetah drives. When factoring in that the Cheetah drive is SCSI and that it is generally a little more expensive, the Velociraptor keeps up with Seagate’s 300GB Cheetah Enterprise 15k RPM drive. Unfortunately, we did not have access to a Seagate Cheetah 600GB 15k RPM drive… but the price for one is more than double the price of the Velociraptor for the exact same capacity and possibly slightly higher speeds.



Also, when looking at the SiSandra results you can notice that they also had the previous generation of drives most notably the 150GB and 300GB Velociraptor drives. If you look at the read performance, you can clearly see the improvements that Western Digital has made on going from the first iteration of the Velociraptor to this 2nd and newest one. The read access times on the Cheetah were slightly quicker than either of the Velociraptors; at 12% faster. Surprisingly enough, the Read performance on the Velociraptor was even faster than the Gigabyte iRAM drive which is already putting it into competition with solid state storage mediums.



When we look at the write tests[pictured above and below], we see more of the same from the Velociraptor over the previous generation. The older Velociraptors are 19% slower in write speeds when compared to the new 600GB Velociraptor. The only interesting thing that we noticed was that the older generation of Velociraptors had a slightly better access time than the new generation. The difference was 0.13 milliseconds, so not even half a millisecond difference. We believe that this could simply be part of the margin of error or that the newer Velociraptor have slightly sacrificed write access times for speed. Of course, none of the drives compared at all to the iRAM drive when it came to access time, but that’s to be expected when comparing hard disk to solid state drives.