Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB Reviewed

Reviewer Experience and Testing Cont'd.
Next we ran some more realistic benchmarks of performance.

First we ran Cinebench of off a different series of storage solutions and compared the overall score and averaged out our results based on 3 tests each. This effectively gave us a different score on every different type of file medium as the processor must fetch all of the files directly from the drive that they were extracted to and the executable was run from. Here we can see which drive solutions are more effective in read speeds.



Looking at our Cinebench scores, we can see that the 128GB RAID array performs better in Cinebench than any of our drive configurations. But when comparing two single drive solutions, HDD vs SSD the difference is very narrow with the VelociRaptor getting 2.96 points and the SSD getting 2.99 points. This, we would consider to be a near virtual tie. So, when it comes to doing rendering... the VelociRaptor is just as fast as the SSD.

Next we ran a series of two different write tests that involved 1080P video files and a large 5GB folder of 3,133 high resolution photographs.



Looking at the results, we can see that when it came to a single large 3GB 1080P video file, the VelociRaptor performed worse than the 128GB SSD or the 4TB RAID array. The difference, though, was not much, but if we were to recommend writing large movie files we would probably still recommend the RAID array. Note, that this RAID array is not a RAID 1 array but a RAID 0 which does present an issue for some as it does increase the possibility of data loss. The VelociRaptor provides a more secure solution as it is less vulnerable than a RAID array, but at the same time still gives a fairly good level of performance when compared to an SSD.



When we compared the 5GB folder containing 3,133 pictures we noticed that the VelociRaptor was much faster than the 128GB SSD and a little slower than the 4TB RAID  array. Once again, though, the RAID array is a more expensive solution and also sacrifices security for speed. As such, the Velociraptor is in the middle ground giving you more space and speed than the SSD but costing less than a 4TB RAID 0 array.

Also, as a disclaimer we must mention that we did have a drive die on us post testing but the new drive confirmed all of our previous findings.