SimHQ.com - Technology Zone - Review: Western Digital's VelociRaptor

Each drive tested was connected to a SATA port on the motherboard (Intel ICH9R) and the OS and application installs copied between drives using Symantec Ghost 11. Because certain synthetic applications for testing drive performance, such as HDTach and IOMeter, do not work with Vista, we decided to make heavy use of Futuremark’s new Vista-only PCMark Vantage, which includes an excellent suite of hard drive tests. The Vantage drive suite is synthetic but uses Intel’s RankDisk, which records a trace of disk activity during usage of real-world applications. This suite runs eight separate tests, ranging from streaming data to OS start-up.

We follow this with a quick look at FSX free flight load times between the three tested drives.

Test Results

PCMark Vantage’s drive suite, as mentioned above, contains eight separate tests. We broke the results down since each test simulates the use of real-world applications. Worth noting is that each test was run twice per drive to verify that consistent results were obtained.


	Test 1: Windows Defender
	Maxtor	16.54 MB/sec
	Raptor	20.53 MB/sec
	VelociRaptor	27.88 MB/sec

The Raptor 150 GB drive outperforms the older Maxtor unit by a solid 25% in this test, but is only roughly 60% of the speed of the VelociRaptor.


	Test 2: Streaming Game Data
	Maxtor	10.63 MB/sec
	Raptor	15.74 MB/sec
	VelociRaptor	19.75 MB/sec

Futuremark cites Alan Wake as an example of a game engine that, large and free roaming in nature, will require constant data streamed from the system’s hard drive. The new VelociRaptor is almost 1/3rd faster than the previous generation, and is almost twice as fast as the Maxtor.


	Test 3: Windows Photo Gallery
	Maxtor	31.94 MB/sec
	Raptor	40.48 MB/sec
	VelociRaptor	59.93 MB/sec

If your family is as big into importing digital photos as my wife, the new Raptor certainly shines in this test, coming close to again doubling the score of the 7200 RPM Maxtor and outperforming the older Raptor by almost 50%.


	Test 4: Windows Vista Start-up
	Maxtor	12.74 MB/sec
	Raptor	18.13 MB/sec
	VelociRaptor	22.46 MB/sec

The test results for OS start-up show the VelociRaptor again dominating the other two drives, and this was certainly reflected in the actual usage of the drives. Vista was noticeably more responsive with either of the two Raptors installed.


	Test 5: Windows Movie Maker
	Maxtor	11.71 MB/sec
	Raptor	31.63 MB/sec
	VelociRaptor	52.51 MB/sec

This particular test and its results reflect drive performance during video editing using Windows Movie Maker and here again the VelociRaptor absolutely trounced the other two drives. WD’s new Raptor outperformed the Maxtor by roughly 450% and scored over 50% higher than the older Raptor.

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