Western Digital's New VelociRaptor VR200M: 10K RPM at 450GB and 600GB
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 6, 2010 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
In the days before SSDs, the VelociRaptor was the drive that raised the cost per GB ceiling. These days, the 600GB drive almost seems like a bargain. Have a look:
| Cost Comparison of Modern HDDs/SSDs | |||||||
| Drive | Capacity | Price | Cost per Gigabyte | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M | 600GB | $329 | $0.548 | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR200M | 450GB | $299 | $0.664 | ||||
| Western Digital VelociRaptor VR150M | 300GB | $199 | $0.663 | ||||
| Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX | 1TB | $120 | $0.120 | ||||
| Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS | 2TB | $250 | $0.125 | ||||
| Intel X25-M G2 | 160GB | $414 | $2.588 | ||||
| Intel X25-M G2 | 80GB | $220 | $2.750 | ||||
Western Digital's pricing picks up where the VR150M left off and drops the cost per gigabyte significantly for the 600GB drive. At $329 vs. $299, I'm not sure there's even a reason to consider the 450GB offering. That extra $30 buys you 150GB at $0.20 per GB. Now obviously compared to a high end 7200 RPM drive, you are paying a price premium for the VelociRaptor. Based on our tests I'd expect to see a 5 - 10% increase in overall system performance compared to a current generation, 7200RPM drive. If you have particularly random workloads, the performance gap can can grow to be something much higher in the 15 - 20% range (or beyond if you're truly I/O bound).
Our AnandTech Bench gaming workload does make the argument that if you're primarily interested in using this drive for games, you might be better served by a larger 3.5" drive. Game installs are pretty big these days and when playing games you're mostly performing sequential reads off the disk, which wastes much of the benefit of the 10K RPM spindle speed. It's only if you're planning on having other apps running in the background that hit the disk while you game that you could benefit from the VelociRaptor.
The rest of the tests make it very clear. As far as hard drives go, you can't beat the random read/write performance of the new VelociRaptor. For applications that absolutely demand to be run on a physical disk, this is your best bet.
The problem is once you take into account solid state storage. The new VelociRaptor boasts a 4KB random write speed of 1.9MB/s. Intel's X25-M G2 is amost 20x faster. The new VelociRaptor averages 178 IOPS in our typical Bench workload, Intel's X25-M can push nearly 800 IOPS in the same test.
While you are getting much more storage for your dollar with the VelociRaptor, a higher performance alternative would be to combine a good SSD with a 1TB drive. Using the SSD for your OS and apps, and the TB drive for all of your music, photos, videos and games. It's this sort of configuration that I use in my personal desktop (except I have two 1TB drives in RAID-1).
If you can't go the SSD route but still need the performance, WD has retaken the crown with the new VelociRaptor. If you can make it work however, you may be happier with an X25-M and a WD Caviar Black instead.
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pjconoso - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
The heatsink is quite massive for such a small hard drive. How hot do these things run? The price is very tempting considering that SSDs are VEEERRYY expensive here in our country (Philippines) but if I'm coming from the regulard Caviar Black and considered something like this, would it be worth it?Goty - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
It's not that the drive runs hot, it's that it's a 2.5" unit and therefore doesn't fit well in most desktop cases. I can't remember where, but I remember some tests that were done not too long ago comparing temps with and without the heatsink and there was little difference.nurd - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Just so. If you actually hold them (well, the 300's at least, and I'm assuming these aren't much different), you'll note that there really isn't a lot of tight contact area for heat to be sunk into it. It's just a carrier; the "heatsink" look is cosmetic.pjconoso - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
In my opinion, they should've opted for the cheap bracket support for mounting this thing as a 3.5-inch hard drive rather than upping the cost because of the heatsink - that would've brought the prices down a bit, don't you think?HillBeast - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
The thing is though, this drive is designed to be in servers and the like and is designed to handle 24/7 operation so if they just opted for a cheap bracket then it will most likely get VERY hot and would probably seize. I have seen this happen to a Seagate once. Any cooling is better than none and I'd rather pay for quality goods.sxr7171 - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
What part of "there wasn't any difference in drive temperature" or "theheatsink" is purely cosmetic did you not understand?
HillBeast - Wednesday, April 7, 2010 - link
What part of any cooling is better than none did you not understand? What part of running these puppies 24/7 in a server with several stacked upon each other whre they will get almost no ventilation and ANY cooling would be better than a crappy metal brack do you not understand?Calin - Thursday, April 8, 2010 - link
In a server they'll probably stay in 2.5 inch enclosures (and for OEM, they'll probably bought without the plate extender). As for heat, they're the the coolest of the test (including 3.5" magnetic hard drives)beachlife - Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - link
Do you have that test result?http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveI...
I find it interesting that the VelociRaptor drive with the Ice Pack Heat sink and one without (WD4500HLHX vs. WD4500BLHX) BOTH have the same Operating temp, 0-55, not sure how this is possible, our testing does not confirm this
Imperceptible - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
I would have liked to see the 2TB variant of the WD Black series used for the sake of comparison, considering that's currently the fastest mechanical drive (apart from these new raptors).