WD VelociRaptor 600GB SATA 6Gbps Hard Drive Review

[Apoptosis]

WD VelociRaptor 600GB SATA 6Gbps Hard Drive Review

WD today announced its first new enthusiast-oriented VelociRaptor hard drive (HDD) in nearly two years with the launch of the 450GB and 600GB capacity drives this morning. These new drives not only double the capacity available for this 10,000 RPM enterprise storage drives, but they also introduce support of the SATA 6Gbps interface and increase the drives cache from 16MB to 32MB!



Article Title: WD VelociRaptor 600GB SATA 6Gbps Hard Drive Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1272/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $299

[JMMD]

Interesting read. Might be time to upgrade my old raptor drive.

[Apoptosis]

Interesting read. Might be time to upgrade my old raptor drive.

which one do you have?

[skier]

good read, wonder how it compares to the WD Cav Black sata3 with 64MB cache that i'm looking at since the read-writes with my old 7200.10 barracuda are 95-82MB/s respectively and it is smaller cache/older tech/slower spindle and isnt hugely behind

[ckthecerealkiller]

Dugg

I have been waiting for this review! Still seems a bit pricey, but way less than a good SSD.

[geokilla]

Skimming the review, all I can say is... Niceeee. Very nice! I'll take this over a SSD anyday.

Btw, the link in the review doesn't lead to this thread.

[Bo_Fox]

Perhaps this will be the one to replace my aging Raptor X in one of my rigs that is kept primarily for the looks (see-thru window). Everybody keeps on being "wowed" when they see the spindle move and it looks pretty in my tricked-out open case lying flat on its side. Well, Vista x64 SP2 is still running strong on that HD and able to run DX11.. if anything happens to Vista and I have to reinstall it, then I'll just format it and replace it with Win7 on a new HD.

My Bloodrage has 2 SAS ports so I could plug in 15000 rpm Cheetah's. I wonder how this 600GB Velociraptor fares against a Seagate 15k.7 600GB cheetah. With a pair of these in Raid 0, it'd probably still give SSD's a good run for its money. Ya know how SSD's slow down in time (the more use, the more trim'ed), right? Also, there are a few real-world benchmarks where SSD's really really suck (lots of info on this over at Techreport.com)..

[countcristo]

If money wasn't an issue, I'd still go for the F200 Corsair SSDs built with their new Sandforce controllers, but yeah, definitely a good upgrade from 7200rpm hard drives with good capacity (without breaking bank).

[gwolfman]

The drive doesn't bring many new features other than SATA 6Gbps and the larger 32MB cache to the table, but WD has doubled the capacity of this 10,000 RPM drive series and did manage to boost performance as advertised. In fact, we noticed more than a 15% performance increase in some benchmarks, which was great to see.

Did you try any of the tests of the new drive on a SATA 3Gbps connection to see how much of the performance benefit is attributed to the new controller interface or the higher aerial density of the drives? Just a thought... In other words, can I get the same benefits of the new drive using my old SATA 3Gbps controller (except for the cache benchmark)?

[Apoptosis]

which test would you like me to re-run on SATA II? I don't have time to re-do them all, but I'll go back and do one or two for you.

[skier]

which test would you like me to re-run on SATA II? I don't have time to re-do them all, but I'll go back and do one or two for you.

ATTO would be good(/also curious)

[gwolfman]

which test would you like me to re-run on SATA II? I don't have time to re-do them all, but I'll go back and do one or two for you.

ATTO would be good(/also curious)

CrystalDiskMark (synthetic) and PCMark (real-world-ish) sound great. ATTO if you have sufficient time. Thanks Nate!

I *heart* LR

[Apoptosis]

Finally got time time to run SATA II versus SATA III benchmarks! Sorry for the delay.

CrysalDisk Mark 3.0 x64:

SATA II

SATA III


ATTO:

SATA II


SATA III


PCmark Vantage HDD Test:

SATA II




SATA III

[Guru]

Thanks for posting the other tests...If i get enough funds in few months...maybe i'll upgrade to this since, my old raptor is giving me 5.2 rating on Win7 Pro 64bit

[gwolfman]

No prob that it took longer, you still followed through.

Looks like you get most of the benefit of the newer drive while still on SATA 3Gbps, which makes this viable for me. Thanks!

[Raraniel]

Do these drives really reap any benefit from SATA 6 gb/s? Both tests looked pretty similar.

[Apoptosis]

burst speed is the only real benefit of a single HDD moving to SATA III from SATA II that you can measure.

[Divide Overflow]

It's good to see that mechanical hard disk drives can still put up a good show. I've been looking for an upgrade to my Raptor 150 and this may be the ticket.

[Z999z3mystorys]

Nice, I wonder how this would work as a "storage" drive when a SSD as The OS drive? Would a <100GB SSD paired with this drive for "storage" (that is a ton of games that I still want to load at a good speed) and do away with 7200 RPM storage drives all-together? (unless you really need more than 600GB storage, I don't in any case, yet.)

[Apoptosis]

Sounds like we are on the same page when it comes to thinking as the last line in my first paragraph in the conclusion is this:

The new 450GB and 600GB VelociRaptors would also make for great secondary storage drives to those that have an SSD as their primary storage drive.