Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB - The New King of Hard Drives?

Benchmarks

Benchmarking Setup:
Intel Core i7 3960X
Gigabyte X79-UD7
16GB of Kingston 1600MHz DDR3
Patriot Pyro 120GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680
Thermaltake Toughpower 1475w Gold

ATTO
ATTO is a very simple disk benchmark and is really used to test the theoretical maximum speed of the VelociRaptor 1TB. As such, we ran this test purely to see the maximum speed of the drive and compare that against the theoretical maximums of the 600GB VelociRaptor.

 

In our test, you can see that the 1TB VelociRaptor does a peak read of 229 MB/s and a peak write of 220 MB/s while the 600GB VelociRaptor did a peak of 155 MB/s read and 151 MB/s write.

AIDA64 Read Test Suite
In AIDA64, we tested the VelociRaptor against a whole slew of hard drives in the read test suite to get a real feel for the drive's abilities. The VelociRaptor managed a Linear Read (Begin) of 206.2 MB/s then dipping to (Middle) 168.1 MB/s and ending at (End) 115 MB/s. For random reads, the drive obtained 130.7 MB/s and had an astonishingly high buffered read of 518 MB/s. The drive also had an amazing average read access time of 6.62 compared to 6.87 of the 600GB VelociRaptor. It was quite clear that in these tests, the VelociRaptor was the fastest hard drive in every sense.

CrystalDiskMark
In CrystalDiskMark we test the drive three times and take the average of those tests as CrystalDiskMark has a tendency of varying between tests. In our tests, the VelociRaptor once again out performed every single drive that we had tested by a pretty good margin and bested the 600GB VelociRaptor by quite a bit.



In our tests, the VelociRaptor 1TB was able to achieve sequential speeds of 214 MB/s read and 209 MB/s read, this is in contrast to the VelociRaptor 600GB which achieved sequential speeds of 165 MB/s read and 147 MB/s write. This represents an increase of 29% on reads and 42% on writes, when Western Digital had been claiming improvements of at least 25%.

HyperPi 1M
In HyperPi we extract the entire benchmark to the specific hard drive and then run the test and check our score. Interestingly, this yields us a broad array of different results with the exact same memory and CPU settings purely because of the storage used and its ability to cope with many small files moving across very quickly. The faster the drive copes with these files, the higher the benchmark score.



Looking at the VelociRaptor 1TB's results, we were astonished to see that it had beaten the next fastest hard drive by a whole second, which we found pretty amazing. This is because the majority of our different hard drives resulted in HyperPi scores all within a second of eachother. The 17.2 second result of the VelociRaptor 1TB is in contrast to the VelociRaptor 600GB which was tied for being the fastest with the Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB.

PCMark7 - Secondary Storage Benchmark
In PCMark 7 we tested the drives by using the Secondary Storage benchmark which is primarily intended to test data usability. In this test, we actually had tested mostly SSDs so we added the 600GB VelociRaptor and the 1TB VelociRaptor just to see how they stacked up. Unfortunately for both drives, they were handily beaten by the three different SSDs.



The 1TB VelociRaptor attained a score of 2352 while the 600GB VelociRaptor came in at 2125. The next highest score after those two drives was the Patriot Pyro 120GB which doubled the score of the VelociRaptor 1TB with a score of 4730. The good news from this bit is that the 1TB VelociRaptor did outperform the 600GB by at least 10% which is good when you consider all of the different metrics used in this benchmark.

SiSoft Sandra - Storage Benchmark
The SiSoft Sandra benchmark was purely intended to be a head to head comparison between the 600GB and 1TB VelociRaptor drives. In this benchmark, the program takes two different tests and then compares both tests side by side to show how the drive stacks up. When measuring the drive's speed in MB/s the benchmark actually takes the average speed between the lowest and highest speeds and does the same with the Random Access Time.



The 1TB VelociRaptor destroys the 600GB in actual read speeds, but in Random Access Time the 600GB somehow wins even though it lost in an earlier benchmark. This is the only blip in all of our testing that could've indicated that the VelociRaptor 1TB wasn't the fastest hard drive in the world. We'll consider it a statistical anomaly.