Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB SATA HD
Our Test Systems and HD Tach
To test the new WD Velociraptor, we used a system built around an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3 GHz) processor and Asus P5E3 Premium X48-based motherboard. The test system was also outfitted with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, an LG optical drive, and a GeForce 8800 GTX. The operating system (Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit) was installed on a separate WD Raptor 74GB drive, and all of the comparison drives were completely blank during testing.
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Motherboard - Video Card - Memory - Audio - Hard Drives -
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Hardware Used: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3 GHz) Asus P5E3 Premium X48 Express / ICH9R chipset GeForce 8800 GTX 2048MB Corsair DDR3-1333 CAS 7 Integrated on board Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB - 10,000RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital RE WD1000FYPS 1TB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB - 7,200RPM - SATA 3Gb/s Western Digital Raptor 150GB 150GB - 10,000RPM - SATA 1.5Gb/s |
Operating System - Chipset Drivers - DirectX - Video Drivers - |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate Intel 8.6.1006 DirectX 10 NVIDIA ForceWare v169.25 Benchmarks Used: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 HD Tune 2.55 IOMeter PCMark Vantage SiSoftware Sandra XII SP2 |
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We began our testing with Simpli Software's HD Tach, which is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible."
As you look through the performance data, please pay special attention to the graph headers, as lower scores indicate better performance in some tests. As you can see, the new WD Velociraptor smokes all of the other drives we tested in every part of the HD Tach test suite, with the exception of CPU utilization. While the WD Velociraptor had the highest CPU Utilization of the bunch, it was also clearly the fastest drive of the bunch.
