WD 300GB VelociRaptor - Wow

The new WD VelociRaptor sure are fast ... especially relative to their older sibling the Raptor.

We just finished doing a bit of tweaking and upgrading to one of our client's personal system.

The setup:

• Intel QX6700 Quad Core Extreme
• ASUS Maximus Formula
• 4GB Ballistix DDR2
• Sapphire HD 4870 512MB PCI-E Video
• 2x 300GB WD VelociRaptor in RAID 1
• Antec Nine Hundred case
• Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit

Once we had the system together and the OS installed, the subsequent boot ups and reboots for driver updates were pretty stunning.

Off the top, the two VelociRaptors come close to performing as well as the 4 Raptors configured in a RAID 0+1 setup!

The new 300GB drives even come in a 3.5" hot swap backplane ready model too.

So, we are looking to configure a set of four in a RAID 0+1 setup to see how much of an increase in performance there will be. We would bet that the performance increase is significant over the RAID 1 VelociRaptor setup, and substantial over the Raptor RAID 0+1 setup given our experience with them this afternoon.

Western Digital is definitely one to watch in the spindle based performance category ... though with the advent of Solid-State Drives (previous blog post), WD has to hope that their significant investment in high performance spindle based drives pays off in the long run.

For now, WD VelociRaptor definitely makes performance to value sense!

From Western Digital's description:

Double the capacity - State-of-the-art technology packs twice the capacity per disk compared to its older brother WD Raptor resulting in 300 GB of high-performance storage space in this enterprise-class 2.5-inch drive. (Not compatible with notebook computers)

Note the lack of laptop support.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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