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Western Digital ups Velociraptor capacity
HARD DRIVE MANUFACTURER Western Digital has, in what some may conjecture is the final roll of the dice for traditional hard drives, launched two larger models in its Velociraptor line.
These models offer 450GB and 600GB capacities thanks to increased areal density of 200GB per platter. Because these are Velociraptor drives, those platters spin at 10,000RPM which, shockingly, after a decade still remains the highest rotational speed in ATA drives. WD decided it was time to support the 6Gbps SATA3 standard and will produce both drives with 32MB cache.
Western Digital has been slow in adopting solid state drive (SSD) technology, having just announced its first WD branded unit in March. Although Velociraptors provide attractive cost per gigabyte compared to SSDs, they can't match SSDs for I/Os per second or data transfer rate performance. However, mechanical hard drives don't suffer from electronic wear like SSDs, so they still offer longer life and better reliability, particularly in write-intensive applications.
The consumer oriented Velociraptors still come with the ridiculous Icepak heatsink, which as most tests show is merely there to boost the ego of those who have spent the best part of $330 for drive whose sequential data transfer rates are almost matched by other models in the firm's own range which have double the areal density. For 'enterprise' customers looking for Serial Attached SCSI level performance on the cheap will, unsurprisingly, be disappointed, but there is a version of the drive without the grandiose heatsink that's suitable for high density rackmount servers.
With SSDs falling in price and the latest trend being to put out low capacity and relatively affordable SSDs as 'OS drives', justifying the considerable outlay on a Velociraptor is becoming harder for the average user who doesn't need to support a large, high activity database system. With SAS drives also becoming more affordable, these latest editions of the Velociraptor might just be the last as the firm finally takes its head out of the sand and embraces SSDs. µ
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I purchased an Intel X18 SSD because it was 1.8" to replace my 4200rpm in my Sony TZ170 for a little performance kick and obviously it will give me HUGE performance over that drive. But I had to test compared to my 2x300gb Velociraptors in RAID-0... HDTach had the raptors hit 453MB/S compared to the SSD hitting 252MB/S on an Asus Motherboards Integrated RAID. I understand there are faster SSDs out there and HDTach only did Sequential Read Test but i'll take the Raptors any day, Windows and games load incredibly fast with both drives. It depends on the Rig your building and its purposes as each make sense to different people with different needs, The Velociraptor i have is fairly quiet but obviously significantly louder than the SSD and less power but Gamers dont really give a rats behind about that. Just my 2 cents! i love me a pair of Velociraptors!
(just for comparison, i had 3x72gb in RAID-0 of the original Raptors and they would hit 336MB/S in the same benchmark)
My Raptor is absolutely crucified by my Gf's WD 640GB Black HDD. Ok it's only the 75GB model but the difference is huge.
Makes it look like a 40GB HDD from 2004.
I'd rather buy a fast (7200) 1GB HDD nowadays. Density is king!
The Raptor line is now just a novelty really. As for the heatsinks? Well my current Raptor is just 6 months old as it was a warranty replacement for my red hot three year old one. But this new one hardly gets warm. Boutique hard drives.
Why would you blow your money on 1.2 TB of high speed storage when most of that space will be used for media like video, music, and games? I would rather have 128 GB of ultra-high speed storage for the OS and applications, then some cheap mass storage for media.
The purpose of high-speed storage is to speed up workflow, to make the computer more responsive and snappier. It's not going to have any effect on media like videos or mp3s.
Let's see. I could spend $660 for 1.2 TBs in a RAID 0, running at great speeds with a pair of Raptors, or for the same price, I can get a single 256GB SSD.
Until SSDs drop into realistic prices, most people aren't going buy them. Average Joe walking into a B&M and seeing a 2TB Western Digital sitting next to a 128 GB SSD. One's $150, the other is $300. Which one will Joe buy?
Its not just the throughput and capacity that counts, but the latency. The lower the latency, the faster the drives will 'feel' during normal use.
The transfer speeds of the newer WD 'Black' drives are probably not far behind the raptors, but trust me, the raptors feel much more responsive (I 2 of the 300GB models).