Western Digital's VelociRaptor 10K RPM SATA Drive

MojoKid was one of a number of people to submit about WDs new 10k RPM SATA Drive. He says "Western Digital's Raptor line of Hard Drives has been very popular with performance enthusiasts, as a desktop drive with enterprise-class performance. Today WD has launched a new line of high-performance desktop drives dubbed the VelociRaptor, and the product finally scales in capacity as well. The new SATA-based VelociRaptor weighs in at 300GB with the same 10K RPM spindle speed, but with one other major difference — it's based on 2.5" technology. Its smaller two-platter, four-head design affords the VelociRaptor random access and data transfer rates significantly faster than competing desktop SATA offerings. Areal density per platter has increased significantly as well, which contributes to solid performance gains versus the legacy WD Raptor series."

Compared to solid state?

[Ed Avis (5917)]

Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

The review only compares the new drive to older models from the same manufacturer, and it turns out to be faster - duh. How does the performance compare with those expensive solid state disks that are starting to appear?

Re:

[serviscope_minor (664417)]

Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

Yeah it's a shame since I like to watch my hard disks fry. Clearly, you enjoy watching your laptop fry as well.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Sivar (316343)]

Power usage = heat.

From the StorageReview.com article [storagereview.com]:

When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.

I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Guspaz (556486)]

They did make the heatsink easily removable, but the drive is designed for the 15mm enterprise form factor (servers, for example), not laptop form factors.

The heatsink (which reduces average temperatures by 5-7 degrees) does work (it's not for show), but these things will never go in laptops.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[adisakp (705706)]

FWIW, 2.5" HD's generally use between 2 to 3 watts of power during seek and writes and even less during idle. This is about 1/2 to 1/3 the power of the VelociRaptor (6.9W) during a write.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[SD-Arcadia (1146999)]

Actually, you can remove the 3.5" container (I believe running it like this voids your warranty) but it still won't fit in a laptop because apparently although 2.5" form factor, it is several mm too high for a laptop. Not that you should attempt to run a 10K drive inside a laptop in the first place, especially without that heatsink thingy. The performance seems to be equal or better than SSD's. source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html [tomshardware.com]

Laptop drive?

[danielsfca2 (696792)]

When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive? Or is it a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" shell?

I assume the power requirements would be intense though, so even if you could fit it in a laptop I suppose it would be unwise unless you're always plugged in.

And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM.

Re:

[Yetihehe (971185)]

Please RTFA. It is 2.5" drive (only a little taller) mounted on 3.5" massive heat sink (IcePAK).

Re:

[giverson (532542)]

2.5" != laptop drive. Many SAS drives are 2.5" but they won't fit in a laptop anytime soon.

Re:

[Sivar (316343)]

Power usage is 60% lower than any drive ever encountered [storagereview.com] (see earlier post). Apparently the huge heatsink is epoxied (or something like that) onto the drive. Not very bright on WD's part, unless I'm missing something.

The enterprise version is supposed to use a standard connector, so those who want their laptop disk IO to outperform most desktops, including most RAID0 arrays, may be able to use those.
For reliability, I have an old 74GB Raptor that's still working fine, but StorageReview's reliability benchma

Re:Laptop drive?

[mcpkaaos (449561)]

When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive?

It is not a laptop drive. Here, take a gander [hothardware.com].

I assume the power requirements would be intense though

According to TFA, the Velociraptor consumes the least power [hothardware.com] out of the drives compared (all WD, including a Raptor 150).

And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM.

I've had 1 drive out of over 20 fail on me in the last 6 years, all made by WD (including several Raptors, which run hot as hell but never seem to skip a beat). The one WD drive that did fail did so only after 3+ years of constant usage in a server.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Besides, why are you relying on a single drive? If you have Important Documents you need redundancy + backups, not a "better" hard drive. You should check this [nongnu.org] out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Re:Laptop drive?

[michrech (468134)]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

Yes, they did replace them all, but when you count in all the time in rebuilding OS installs, shipping, phone calls to get RMA's, etc, it's just not worth it.

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

I had sworn off of WD drives in the mid/late '90's because of similar issues. No matter what, though, I couldn't talk my boss out of using them. He learned to listen to my opinions after that, though...

Now, before I start getting modded down to hell, here; yes, I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives. Unfortunately (for WD), your experiences seem to be far and few between.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Re:

[raw-sewage (679226)]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

[...]

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

I don't doubt the ac

Re:Laptop drive?

[mobby_6kl (668092)]

I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems ;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.

Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...

The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.

Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately :D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are [westerndigital.com]). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.

I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. [sunrise.ru] It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. [sunrise.ru] It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.

I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.

-----------

From another reply:
> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...

Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?

Re:

[camperslo (704715)]

Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop.
At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.

It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer.
You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive

Noise Level

[MankyD (567984)]

I've always wondered - what's the noise like on a 10k drive? I would think its safe to assume that they're louder, but with smaller platters, who knows. I'm always working to make my machine quieter, and sometimes this seems to come into conflict with making it faster.

Re:

[Rakeris (1114111)]

I have one, and it's very quite. It's makes about the same amount of noise as my 500GB samsung. The only difference is it makes a bit of light "clicking" whenever it's doing a lot of reading/writing.

Re:

[skiflyer (716312)]

Next to my 7800gt fan I don't even hear the two raptors I have clicking away.

Re:

[mad zambian (816201)]

I use a striped pair of 36GB Raptors for my system disk. (Data disk is 3 drive RAID 5) Speed is great, but the little brutes do need active cooling, and are anything but quiet. Maybe it is the pair of them doing synchronous seeks that make them so noisy, who knows? They are the noisiest disks I have used since a pair of 250MB Connors about 15 years ago. Happy with them? Oh hell yes. Next computer will have the same setup, but much more noise damping.

Re:Noise Level

[Sivar (316343)]

The first 10KRPM drives sounded like what you'd get when you put ice cubes in a blender. I seriously ducked the first time I heard one start to seek.

The WD Raptor 74GB is alright. I can hear it, but I wouldn't say it's loud or annoying (and I have one of those open Lian-Li cases that have 50000 holes).

This new one is supposed to be one of the quietest drives ever measured.

More interesting review

[Sivar (316343)]

The review is up on on StorageReview.com [storagereview.com]. You can use the database [storagereview.com] to compare this drive to every other drive out there in different kinds of tasks.

Re:

[Vigile (99919)]

Some of the other reviews to check out:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=548&pid=2 [pcper.com]
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583 [techreport.com]
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever [maximumpc.com]

1 GB/$, ouch

[rubeng (1263328)]

It's a little better than the current Raptors' [diskcompare.com] 0.88 GB/$, but nowhere close to the 6.25 GB/$ for a Samsung Spinpoint F1 [diskcompare.com]. You gotta wonder if a RAID array of cheaper drives wouldn't give you overall better performance, and more than 2x the storage for way less money.

Re:

[corychristison (951993)]

I have always believed that is why RAID0 has been so popular.

You get better performance, bigger drive, and it's only pitfall is that if one drive dies, then they are both pretty toast.

Re:

[dfn_deux (535506)]

Say that 1 expensive drive has a reliability rating of 2u (arbitrary units, where higher is better) and you are advocating using two cheaper drives with a reliability of 1u each, then striping them gives a combined reliability of 1u/2 or .5u... maybe you get performance approaching the 1 expensive disk but at a cost of 75% reliability. Realistically the target market for these drives is deploying them in arrays with parity and spares. I personally don't see any performance increase when going to 2 drives vs

Re:

[Sivar (316343)]

RAID isn't going to give you better performance than this Raptor other than in STR (sustained transfer rate, like copying large files or streaming HD video). STR is about worthless for desktop computers, though RAID0 does improve performance for other things a bit.

Just, not as much as people seem to think when they read a misleading benchmark written by some dope that thinks HDTach and Atto are worth the floppy disks they're installed from. (They are great tools for what they do, just, they are misu

Re:

[Tumbleweed (3706)]

Gee, a super-fast drive costs more per gigabyte than a normal drive. Who woulda thunk it?

You should read some reviews of cars just to make sure a Ferrari costs more per mph than, say, a Ford Focus.

Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps

[MosesJones (55544)]

If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.

Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.

I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.

Re:

[danielsfca2 (696792)]

niiiiiice. I see what you did there.

Re:

[a_nonamiss (743253)]

I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.

Wow... we're almost performing up to the level we were at in 1989.

Re:

[MP3Chuck (652277)]

I know you're trying to be funny, but there is such a thing [anandtech.com]. :)

So sad

[TheLink (130905)]

After all so many years, drives are still so slow.

7.6ms random access write. 119MB/sec transfer - that's less that 1Gbps.

So still have to stick lots and lots of drives together.

Raptors? Run!

[Nushio (951488)]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors [xkcd.com]...

Re:Raptors? Run! - apologies to Yakov Smirnoff..

[CdBee (742846)]

In corporate America, geeks consume Velociraptors..

I have no confidence in anything from WD

[jskline (301574)]

I've gone through 3 drives now from them for 2 of my 3 laptops. The first one made it 10 months and technically was still under warranty. But because the manufacture date stamp on the drive was more than 12 months, they would not honor my warranty. Yea, I had the receipt but the guy in India was not concerned with that and would only take a credit card number to order another one at full retail price! Screw em'. Drilled a big bad hole through the thing and put in recycle bin.

Two other drives didn't even mak

Re:I have no confidence in anything from WD

[moosesocks (264553)]

Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty [wdc.com].

I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.

I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.

If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.

The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.

Get yourself a better supplier or transport ..

[freaker_TuC (7632)]

I've been buying +300 WD's for over 10 years now; had 2 disks DOA and 4 disks which died later on. Most of the older disks I got stored in a container as extra backup.

One of these disks dying is even my own fault by tilting it while writing.
Also, I've been hearing stories at my suppliers; disks made around JUNE-OCTOBER are mostly the ones with the most problems. I wouldn't know it's a general believe although I'm for sure checking my labels before assigning a disk to a server as precaution to myself.

I've ha

Re:

[truthsearch (249536)]

Couldn't this be useful for gaming? Typically lots of small images, textures, audio, etc. get loaded throughout gameplay.

I'm not a game developer, so I'm just speculating.

Re:Has only one application

[Colonel Korn (1258968)]

So...this beats the data throughput of any of the 7200 RPM drives by about 50%, and outperforms them in real world benchmarks by about the same, and it does it while consuming LESS power than the WD Green Power drives. It also for the first time comes within about 10% of the speed of a 10k SCSI disk for server-tasks, while using far, far less power. This sounds like a great low end server drive to me, and it's clearly the best single user drive by a large margin. Check out the storagereview.com review, since they actually know what they're doing.

Re:Has only one application

[dfghjk (711126)]

I would suggest you check out the storagereview.com review since they don't support the claims you are making. In applications benchmarks the margins are far, far less than 50%.

Re:

[Sivar (316343)]

The 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 is $675.00 at Dell (source: Google [google.com], while the Raptor is (supposedly) about $300.

That's 2.25 times the cost per megabyte.

According to this performance database [storagereview.com] (choose IOMeter 8 I/O. I can't link to it directly, it doesn't seem to support that), the Seagate drive does 293 IOPS vs. the Raptor 3000's 228, so it's only 28% faster (on an 8-deep workload, which is a fairly common one, maybe a little deep).

Cost-per-IOPS wise, the Raptor blows the 15K SCSI drive away. Of course, the

Re:

[What Would NPH Do (1274934)]

Yeah, cause plugging in the power cable and then connecting the SATA cable to the motherboard is just such a hard task. I'm surprised anyone is able to muster the enormous amount of skill that's required by such a task.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do (1274934)]

I didn't say it was particularly hard in a PC, just that the Mac is much easier. You slide out a little metal tray, put the drive in the tray, slide the tray back in.

I do the exact same thing in my PC. It's called a hard drive rack. You can buy them for around 23 dollars on Newegg.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do (1274934)]

Actually, if you price a Mac Pro vs. a similarly spec'd workstation from Dell, the Apple frequently comes in a few dollars cheaper.

That's not really saying much to me as I don't buy anything from Dell. I build my own PCs and cut out the middleman markups.

Apple really does not have a high margin on base Mac Pros, ie without the ridiculous memory upgrade costs.

Considering I've spec'd out comparable systems with parts from Newegg and Frys that cost anywhere from 50% to 66% the Mac Pro, I'd say they have a pretty hefty margin.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do (1274934)]

Well I just spec'd out a system that matches (and in many cases surpasses) this $2800 Mac Pro, http://store.apple.com/AppleStore/WebObjects/BizCustom.woa/9794008/wo/YvG4Po3p3yxA2wHk7uDuP4Rzytr/1.?p=0 [apple.com] , and it cost me all of 1300 dollars. So the question becomes, what's that 1500 premium buying me exactly? Looks like a big fat nothing to me.

Re:

[What Would NPH Do (1274934)]

OS X

Don't want. So that's no added value to me. I run Debian on all my boxes.

a nicely made case,

Not really. The case I chose was in many was much better looking and more offered more space for upgrades than the one they are selling at least from looking at the pictures they offer.

a well tested set of components (supposedly),

Except in the case of the component being explicitly stated I got the exact same thing. So that's no advantage for Apple. In fact that's just highlighting just how much they are trying to rip me off.

direct support for hardware AND software issues from Apple, since they made everything and can't weasel out of support by claiming "it was the other guys stuff that broke!"

This is the only thing remotely approaching wo

Re:

[Demolition (713476)]

There's no use even making the comparison. You buy what you want because it makes sense for you. Other people buy Mac Pros (or Dells, HPs, or whatever) because they want the warranty, tech support, dealer network, etc. Apple just doesn't see folks like you as part of its market.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[WhoBeDaPlaya (984958)]

Exactly. It would only be flamebait if you posted something like :
Mac: Hey PC, what are you doing?
PC: Playing a video game.
Mac: Which one?
PC: All of them.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

Uh, actually, hard drive upgrades are easier in the Mac Pro than in any other computer I have ever owned.

You didn't mention that your other computers were DEC Alphas and PDP-3's.

Re:

[toddestan (632714)]

Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.