Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo Review

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with an SSD for the OS and benchmark installations. Our testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available as of press time and AHCI mode was enabled. The drives inside the external storage unit were left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark 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.

As we mentioned earlier, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo is geared for Macs, and the unit ships with the drives striped in a RAID 0 array for maximum performance and formatted with the HFS + Journaled file system. Because we tested the device in the Windows environment as well, we had to reformat to NTFS, and because of the current lack of support for Windows we had to test with the drives set up as JBOD. We’ve been told that a firmware update enabling RAID in Windows is coming, but it wasn’t ready in time for us to test it out. Thus, note that our normal spate of performance numbers we're showing here will go up when the drives are striped in RAID 0.

** RAID 0 and Mac Testing:  We did, however, also run a couple of tests with a MacBook Pro, so you can at least see some hard numbers on read and write speeds with RAID 0 configured.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i5 and SSD Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Hard Drives -

Hardware Used: Intel Core i5-3470 Intel DZ77RE-75K (Z77 Chipset, AHCI Enabled) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 8GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 OCZ Vertex 4 SSD 128GB (OS Drive) WD Caviar Green 3TB WD Velociraptor 600GB WD Velociraptor 1TB WD AV-GP 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 3TB Seagate Barracuda 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT 3TB

OS - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - Processor - RAM - HDD -  OS -

Relevant Software: Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 x64 Intel 9.3.0.1101, iRST 11.0.0.1024 DirectX 11 NVIDIA GeForce 8.17.12.9573 Benchmarks Used: HD Tune v5 ATTO v2.47 CrystalDiskMark v3.01 x64 PCMark 7 MacBook Pro (13-inch): Dual-core Intel Core i5 4GB DDR3-1600MHz 500GB (5400RPM) -Mac OS X 10.8.2

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ATTO is a "quick and dirty" type of disk benchmark that measures transfer speeds across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and graphs them out in an easily interpreted chart. We chose .5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes and a queue depth of 6 over a total max volume length of 256MB. ATTO's workloads are sequential in nature and measure raw bandwidth, rather than I/O response time, access latency, etc. This test was performed on blank, formatted drives with default NTFS partitions in Windows 7 x64.

ATTO Disk Benchmark More Information Here: http://bit.ly/btuV6w

In both the read and write tests, the My Book VelociRaptor Duo got off to a rather slow start, but once the test got past the 4K transfer size mark, it exploded. The only drive in our test bank that did better was another 1TB VelociRaptor SATA hard drive, which was mounted as an internal drive.