The increased performance offered by VelociRaptor over Raptor came as a very pleasant surprise but that’s only part of the story. Raptor is a fast hard drive but it's annoyingly noisy and gets rather hot. In comparison, the Hitachi drive is effectively silent, while the Crucial SSD is silent. All three drives have the same idle noise level - 29dBA - but when the drives start to work, the VelociRaptor sits between the Raptor and Hitachi drives in terms of noise. It’s relatively quiet and won’t cause you much in the way of annoyance.
2GB Data Transfer Results
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
The big news is the tiny power draw of VelociRaptor, which is only 4.5W at idle and 6.1W when the drive is working. That’s half the power draw of the Raptor and the Hitachi and the result is that the VelociRaptor is impressively cool to the touch even when it’s working hard.
The Crucial SSD is another story. This new technology costs a fortune and the capacity of the earliest models makes it relatively useless. You could use a 32GB SSD to store your OS and applications and the result would be a quiet PC that starts impressively quickly. Back in the real world, you'd likely need a regular hard drive to store your data files as the slow write speed of the SSD would hamper performance.
Thankfully, there are new models of SSD from the likes of OCZ coming to market that offer higher capacity, lower prices and will offer a direct replacement for the hard drive. We'll be looking at these in due course.
Verdict
VelociRaptor is staggeringly fast yet also very quiet. And with 300GB of capacity it's a must-have for anyone building a Media Centre PC or a new gaming rig. Provided, of course, you can afford the steep asking price.
WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD
COMMENTS
@Adrian
You could most likely treat the X61 that way, even if it had a mechanical hdd, and not the SSD device.
Ever hear of "Thinkvantage Active Protection"? It works, believe me.
//Svein
well said Andy Bright!
couldn't have put it better meshelf!
;)
useless thanks
so why while you gave proper mb/s numbers you dont give anything that tests heavy random IO which, after all, where the SSD might show interesting benefits, or for example tests using two IO threads (for the gamers: think leeching your new game off a p2p net and recording something with fraps)
This is an interesting test, but oh so inconclusive, you stopped halfway!
SSDs
I used the Crucial SSD as it was what I had to hand - I don't have a sample of the OCZ despite asking but when I get one you'll read about it.
I've reviewed the Intel SSD and expect it to go up very soon and then you'll see how a proper SSD performs ...
In an ideal world we would have majored on VelociRaptor vs Raptor but the fact of the matter is that Raptor is now rather old and didn't compare especially well to the Hitachi 7K1000 which is indeed a peach and offers superb value for money.
HD size?
Not sure about you guys, but unless you have around 30-50 games you regularly play, gaming PCs simply don't need the hard capacity of a PC devoted to media.
Nothing wrong with having more HD space of course, but not if it comes at the cost of speed.
Of course gamers could be using their computers for other things, in which case most would opt for a second drive on it's own channel.
However most gamers I know would take a 30gb drive (or even less) if they knew it offered even an imperceptible increase in frame rate or an unnoticeable decrease in load times.
As long as it had the capacity to hold the 1/2 dozen games they regularly play while still maintaining 40-50% free space, they'd be happy.
Second drives are for media, bothersome office applications or whatever else people do when they aren't playing games. And it better be on its own channel, if it even so much as looks at my main hd, it'll be out of the PC and sitting in the corner thinking about what it did.
