A Case for Spinning Platters
With prices of SSDs coming down gradually but surely, one might be tempted to think that there’s no place left for traditional mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs). From a performance standpoint, traditional hard disk drives with their platters, actuators and heads can only dream of competing with today’s SSDs. However, what HDDs have going for them are decades of tested and proven reliability. As we noted in our review of Intel’s SSD 520 Series SSD, early drives with SandForce's SF-2281 controller were plagued by a BSOD bug. Though the bug has since been rectified with firmware updates, it seems that a handful of drives are still suffering from random occurrences of BSODs. Such issues are rare with mechanical HDDs.
Like VelociRaptor HDDs of old, the new drive comes with a large heatsink which Western Digital calls "IcePack".
Apart from reliability, other aspects in which HDDs trump SSDs is capacity and price. Even though SSDs have made significant headway in terms of increasing capacity, the largest readily available consumer SSDs top out at 512GB, whereas the largest capacity HDDs come in at 3TB. Price-wise, a decent 512GB SSD would cost in excess of S$600, while an equivalent sized HDD would cost no more than S$90 On the other hand, the largest HDD capacity of 3TB comes in at only around S$250.
With these considerations in mind, mechanical HDDs certainly still have a place in today’s systems, which is why Western Digital is introducing their latest iteration of VelociRaptor HDD. The VelociRaptor is Western Digital’s flagship line of mechanical HDDs and was first introduced in 2003 as the ‘Raptor’ which was then also the first 10,000RPM SATA drive in the world. As such, the VelociRaptor comes with a bit of heritage and were in fact very popular amongst enthusiasts. The new VelociRaptor that was made available early last month comes in three capacities - 250GB, 500GB and 1TB - and the one we have in our labs is the 1TB version.
Physically, the new VelociRaptor is not that different from the model it replaces. Although the drive itself is effectively of a 2.5-inch form factor, it is mounted on a specially-designed "IcePack" mounting frame which acts as a heatsink for the fast spinning drive and is what gives the drive its 3.5-inch form factor. The drive is made in a 2.5-inch form factor because it's difficult to control and design larger platters (such as those on 3.5-inch drives) spinning at such insanely fast speeds at close distances without developing severe problems. As such, the drive mounted on the IcePack to form its final 3.5-inch form factor bodes well for it.
Underneath the familiar form factor, the new VelociRaptor still spins at 10,000RPM but this has been complemented by a larger 64MB cache and a new controller. Lastly, the VelociRaptor also uses the latest SATA 6Gbps interface for the quickest possible transfers. These improvements should boost the drive’s performance and help bridge the gap between traditional mechanical HDDs and SSDs.
Old and new side by side. Which is which? The new drive is on the left, while the model it replaces is on the right.
Nothing fancy, the new VelociRaptor HDD has your usual SATA power and data connectors. Needless to say, it uses the latest SATA 6Gbps interface.
Test Setup
The drives were tested on our storage testbed, which has the following system specifications:
- Intel Core i5-2400 (3.1GHz)
- MSI Z68A-GD80 (Intel Z68 chipset)
- 2 x 4GB DDR3-1600MHz memory
- MSI GeForce 8600 GTS
- Windows 7
The list of SSDs tested are as follows:
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB
- Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB
- OCZ Vertex 4 (256GB) (Firmware 1.5 Beta)
- Transcend SATA III SSD720 (256GB) (Firmware: 5.0.2)
- Kingmax SATA III SSD SMP35 Client (240GB) (Firmware: L0306)
- Intel SSD 520 Series (240GB)
- Intel X-25M Gen.2 (160GB)
Despite the new Western Digital VelociRaptor HDD being positioned as an enthusiast hard drive, we obviously don’t expect it to even come close to the performance levels of today’s SSDs. Key comparisons here will be made between the new VelociRaptor and the older model it replaces. Bear in mind however that the older model topped out at only 300GB, while the new model tested here is 1TB. This means the VelociRaptor drive has more physical sectors, and traditionally, this could negatively impact performance - if all else remained equal. However, with the advances made to the platter density, newer controller, SATA interface and increased cache, these aspects should be more than enough to show off the new drive's capability.
To keep things interesting, we’ve also included results from some of the fastest consumer-grade SSDs in the market today. This will give us a bigger picture of how much faster is an SSD when compared to an enthusiast-grade high performance mechanical HDD. We’ve also included results from an older generation SSD the Intel X-25M (Gen.2).
The list of benchmarks used are as follows:
- AS-SSD benchmark 1.6.4
- HD Tune Pro 4.6
- CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1
- PCMark 7
- PCMark Vantage
- Iometer (version 2006.07.27)
AS SSD Results
AS SSD is a benchmark that uses non-compressible and completely random data. What this means is that the drives using the SF-2281 controller cannot compress the data first, which takes away one of the strong advantages of this controller. Therefore this is a useful benchmark because drives that use the SF-2281 don't gain an upper hand.
Right from the get-go, we can see that even the fastest mechanical HDDs are no much for today’s SSDs. While sequential read and write performance is still somewhat decent compared to SSDs, the moment we move into smaller data blocks, the figures become ridiculously lop-sided in favor of the SSDs. Nevertheless, the new VelociRaptor drive has showed very significant improvements over the old drive which it replaces. Despite the larger capacity, sequential read and write performance was over 50% better while performance in the 4k, 64 queue depth run was over 30% better in read operations and a whopping 83% faster in write operations.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 Results
CrystalDiskMark is an easy-to-run and quick utility to use to gauge a drive’s performance. It measures sequential read and write performance and random read and write speeds of random 4KB, 4KB (queue depth 32) and 512KB data.
HD Tune Pro 4.6 Results
On HD Tune, the new 1TB VelociRaptor drive was significantly quicker than its predecessor. Looking at the average speed for both read and write performance test runs, the new drive was around 50% faster. Still, even then it is no match for SSDs. When testing random read performance, the new VelociRaptor was around 30% faster. When it came to random write performance, the old 300GB VelociRaptor had the upper hand as it was around 15% quicker in this aspect.
Futuremark PCMark 7 Results
PCMark 7 is the latest benchmarking suite from FutureMark that evaluates the performance of Windows 7 machines. It tests a wide range workloads and aspects of the system ranging from computation, image and video manipulation and storage. We’ll be looking solely at the storage test here.
On PCMark 7, the new VelociRaptor’s drive score was about only 50% of that of the fastest SSD drives, showing just how wide the gap in performance is. Compared to the old VelociRaptor, the new drive’s overall score was 24% better.
Futuremark PCMark Vantage Results
PCMark Vantage might have been around for quite some time, but it is still a fairly accurate representation of how the drives might be used in real-world scenarios. We are focusing on the hard drive test suite which comprises of tasks such as loading of applications to media creation.
On PCMark Vantage, the two mechanical hard drives were comprehensively outscored by all the SSDs. Between the two, the new VelociRaptor showed off the benefits of its larger cache, new controller and new technologies by recording 9479 PCMarks, which is an impressive improvement of over 50%.
Iometer Results (Part 1)
Lastly, we put the drives through the rigorous grind of Iometer, with different workloads and I/O queue depths. We have chosen to show results from a queue depth of 1 to 5 as this better represents the workloads a typical consumer might face. A more taxing queue depth would be appropriate for enterprise usage scenarios, but since most of our tests lately have been pro-consumer with SSD reviews, we'll focus on how it might matter to end-users.
On the 64k streaming reads run, the new VelociRaptor drive was markedly faster than its predecessor, and on the 64k streaming writes run, it was faster than even the Kingmax and the older Intel X25-M SSD. Finally, on the file and web server workloads, the two VelociRaptor drives were almost on a par and were much slower than the other SSDs.
Iometer Results (Part 2)
Lastly, we look at the I/O response times for the workloads reported on the previous page. In terms of response times, the new VelociRaptor drive, despite its much larger capacity, is significantly quicker than the older VelociRaptor drive especially on the 64k streaming reads and writes tasks. However, on the the file and web server workloads, the two mechanical HDDs are very similar and are very much slower than SSDs.
Fast, but not "SSD" Fast
As expected, even the newest iteration of Western Digital’s famed VelociRaptor drive falls short of challenging SSDs when it comes to outright performance. While sequential read/write speeds are actually pretty decent, these are not indicative of actual everyday usage. And when it comes to random access operations and dealing with small data blocks, mechanical HDDs and the physical limitations of their moving parts simply cannot keep up with the entirely electronic SSDs.
Nevertheless, the newest VelociRaptor drive is markedly quicker than the old drive which it replaces. Looking at our results, the new VelociRaptor, despite the much larger capacity (1TB vs 300GB), was significantly faster than the older VelociRaptor in all aspects. On a whole, the drive was roughly around 25% to 30% quicker and that’s a rather remarkable achievement considering how mature mechanical HDD technology already is. This is definitely the fastest consumer hard disk you can get your hands on.
The new VelociRaptor is left in the dust by SSDs, but it is easily the fastest mechanical HDD around now. Furthermore, it is ultra-reliable and relatively more affordable and therefore a viable alternative for perhaps more budget-conscious and discerning enthusiasts balancing speed and capacity.
Therefore, for users who need the reliability of a traditional mechanical HDD and also the capacity, the new Western Digital VelociRaptor comes highly recommended. It won’t outperform any SSD, but it is backed by the tried-and-tested reliability of being a mechanical drive based solution and also Western Digital’s esteemed VelociRaptor brand. Furthermore, with a recommended price of S$429 for the 1TB drive, the VelociRaptor is much more economical than any SSD.
To put this into perspective, one of the more affordable 512GB SSD units we could find costs around S$650, while the most expensive was a whopping S$1049. Taking $650 as our point of reference, what this means is that for the price of two such SSDs (to make up 1TB), you could buy three VelociRaptor drives for a grand total of 3TB. Or, you could easily get two VelociRaptor drives and have them in a RAID 0 configuration for even more performance. Something to think about perhaps?
Not to forget, you still have smaller capacity VelociRaptor drive options such as a 500GB and 250GB models that are pegged at S$289 and S$219 respectively and are very competitively priced to replace the older 150GB and 300GB editions of the VelociRaptor drives. Granted that it's still three times the cost of normal 7,200RPM drives, it's also a good degree faster than them and is safe option should you not want to muck around with the SSD units which are far from being mature at this point of time.
To drive home the importance of reliability and dependability, Western Digital is also offering VelociRaptor with a 5-year warranty. In a time when hard drive manufacturers are cutting back on their warranties, the offer of a 5-year warranty is much welcomed and shows just how confident Western Digital is of their flagship hard drive product.
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