WD VelociRaptor 600GB: Fastest Hard Drive Ever
Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a different hard disk used for the OS and benchmark installations. The drives were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO and Vantage benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle before invoking a test.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core i7 870 Asus P7P55D-Premium (P55 Express Chipset) GeForce GTX 280 6144MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board WD VelociRaptor 600GB WD VelociRaptor 300GB Seagate Barracuda XT Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 WD RE4 |
OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate Intel 9.1.0.1012 DirectX 10 NVIDIA v190.82 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 IOMeter 2008 ATTO ver 2.41 CrystalDiskMark PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP4a |
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In the following tables, we're showing two sets of IOMeter access patterns running on our test drives; one with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and one with IOMeter's default access pattern of 2K transfers, 67% reads and 100% random access.
Western Digital's new 600GB VelociRaptor is the fastest of the hard drives tested here, with only the 300GB VelociRaptor puttin up similar numbers. Response times were unexpectedly high, but in terms of IOPS and data transfer rates, the VelociRaptor crushed the competition.
