Western Digital's VelociRaptor 10K RPM SATA Drive

MojoKid was one of a number of people to submit about WDs new 10k RPM SATA Drive. He says "Western Digital's Raptor line of Hard Drives has been very popular with performance enthusiasts, as a desktop drive with enterprise-class performance. Today WD has launched a new line of high-performance desktop drives dubbed the VelociRaptor, and the product finally scales in capacity as well. The new SATA-based VelociRaptor weighs in at 300GB with the same 10K RPM spindle speed, but with one other major difference — it's based on 2.5" technology. Its smaller two-platter, four-head design affords the VelociRaptor random access and data transfer rates significantly faster than competing desktop SATA offerings. Areal density per platter has increased significantly as well, which contributes to solid performance gains versus the legacy WD Raptor series."

Comments

Compared to solid state?

[Ed Avis]

Interesting to see that 2.5" form factor disks are now faster than their desktop-size cousins. In a way it's a shame that WD decided to bulk out the case with extra heatsinks... it would have been more fun for them to ship a properly sized 2.5" drive you could put in your laptop.

The review only compares the new drive to older models from the same manufacturer, and it turns out to be faster - duh. How does the performance compare with those expensive solid state disks that are starting to appear?

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Sivar]

Power usage = heat.

From the StorageReview.com article:

When spinning up from a cold start, the WD3000BLFS maintains its prowess with a very economical showing on its 12V rail. At just 9 watts, the VelociRaptor weighs in a full 6 watts (66%!) lower than any other drive SR has ever encountered.

I think the heatsink is mostly for show, and to make the drive fit into a normal case. Still, it would be nice if they made it easily removable.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[SD-Arcadia]

Actually, you can remove the 3.5" container (I believe running it like this voids your warranty) but it still won't fit in a laptop because apparently although 2.5" form factor, it is several mm too high for a laptop. Not that you should attempt to run a 10K drive inside a laptop in the first place, especially without that heatsink thingy. The performance seems to be equal or better than SSD's. source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Guspaz]

They did make the heatsink easily removable, but the drive is designed for the 15mm enterprise form factor (servers, for example), not laptop form factors.

The heatsink (which reduces average temperatures by 5-7 degrees) does work (it's not for show), but these things will never go in laptops.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[adisakp]

FWIW, 2.5" HD's generally use between 2 to 3 watts of power during seek and writes and even less during idle. This is about 1/2 to 1/3 the power of the VelociRaptor (6.9W) during a write.

Re:Compared to solid state?

[Random Destruction]

Friction also equals heat. I imagine that a hard drive spinning at 10,000 RPM would generate quite a bit of friction. no. input energy = heat.

more friciton = more input energy, so theres no reason to look any further than how much energy it consumes, no matter what your thoughts are on high RPM platters.

Laptop drive?

[danielsfca2]

When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive? Or is it a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" shell?

I assume the power requirements would be intense though, so even if you could fit it in a laptop I suppose it would be unwise unless you're always plugged in.

And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM.

Re:Laptop drive?

[giverson]

2.5" != laptop drive. Many SAS drives are 2.5" but they won't fit in a laptop anytime soon.

Re:Laptop drive?

[mcpkaaos]

When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive? It is not a laptop drive. Here, take a gander.

I assume the power requirements would be intense though According to TFA, the Velociraptor consumes the least power out of the drives compared (all WD, including a Raptor 150).

And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM. I've had 1 drive out of over 20 fail on me in the last 6 years, all made by WD (including several Raptors, which run hot as hell but never seem to skip a beat). The one WD drive that did fail did so only after 3+ years of constant usage in a server.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Besides, why are you relying on a single drive? If you have Important Documents you need redundancy + backups, not a "better" hard drive. You should check this out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.

Re:Laptop drive?

[camperslo]

Even without the cooling, the 2.5" based core is still way too thick/hot for a laptop.
At $1/gig it is still way cheaper than solid state drives, but expect those to get cheaper faster.

It's frustrating that the power benchmark they're using is measuring the whole computer.
You'd think someone doing benchmarks would use a small separate supply for the drive(s) to do the measurement. If the standby consumption and efficiency under load were measured for a small separate supply (easily determined with resistive dummy-loads), one could then get pretty accurate numbers for the drive by measuring the input power to the supply and doing a few simple calculations.

If the power and connector locations were compatible it'd be fun to see one of these in a 24" Core 2 iMac. For those using the iMac as a 1080i PVR, it'd really speed things like extracting the commercial-free version of a tv recording.

Re:Laptop drive?

[michrech]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

Yes, they did replace them all, but when you count in all the time in rebuilding OS installs, shipping, phone calls to get RMA's, etc, it's just not worth it.

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

I had sworn off of WD drives in the mid/late '90's because of similar issues. No matter what, though, I couldn't talk my boss out of using them. He learned to listen to my opinions after that, though...

Now, before I start getting modded down to hell, here; yes, I realize there are people (like you) that seem to have had very good luck with WD's drives. Unfortunately (for WD), your experiences seem to be far and few between.

I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

Re:Laptop drive?

[raw-sewage]

Probably comes from people who, like me, used a ton of WD200, WD400, WD800, and some others, that had over 90% failure rate in the first 6 months. The only reason the OEM I worked for even used the drives is that they were cheaper (by only a few bucks, but every buck counts in this business!) than the others.

[...]

Once we switched to Seagate, we never had to deal with all of that again. Yes, we might have 1 drive go bad once in a blue moon, but no where near what we had with WD.

I don't doubt the accuracy of your story, but I've heard the same story over and over again, but with every hard drive manufacturer. I build my own computers, and have been for quite some time. I research the heck out of my components before I buy them. Like a lot of people, I want to get the best bang for my buck. Reliability factors into that. But in all the research I've done, as far as hard drive reliability goes, I've found that you don't have to look too hard to find your exact story, only with Seagate or Maxtor or Fujitsu or Hitachi or whatever. Seriously, go check out the forums at StorageReview.com, and do a search for "reliable". You'll find all kinds of "authoritative" posts like this:

I've been a [sysadmin/system integrator/builder/whatever] for [10+] years. I've always used [WD/Seagate/Hitachi/whatever], and only had [very small number] failures out of [very large number] of drives.

...Or the analogue, like your post, where someone has had [very large number] of failures with a particular brand.

The point is, I think all manufacturers (in general, not just hard drive makers) go through bad spells. Unfortunately, those bad spells typically aren't found out until too long after the fact. Best bet, if you can get away with it, is probably to buy technology that's a generation or two old, so you can see how the product has fared thus far. Sometimes I know that's not possible, so if it were me, I'd probably buy from multiple vendors, and spread the risk.

Also, if I remember correctly, there was that study done by Google on hard drive reliability/longevity that said no brand was more failure prone than the next.

Re:Laptop drive?

[mobby_6kl]

I'm not sure who's the one with comprehension problems ;). What I'm saying is that if 90% of the drives fail within the first 6 months, the probability of significant numbers of them (depending on sample size and other stuff, which of course you don't actually reveal. See below) lasting more than a couple of years is extremely thin since, at best, they'd be following ~4-8% annualized failure rates as per the Google paper, and possibly much worse because WD drives are obviously so terrible.

Of course, this all depends on how one interpretes your story. Did 10% of your customers experience no failures, while the other 90% all lost their drives within 6 months? Or did all customers lose 90% of their drives? Or was that 10% of 10% of HDDs that survived? Really, between your two posts this is not very clear at all. Never mind though. The whole point of that part of my post was to set up the silly counter example, on which, by the way, you did not call me out. Which brings me to...

The "full of it" part was supposed to illustrate how foolish it is to use limited personal anecdotes (that's what they are, plural of anecdote != data) to make any strong statements, notice that I used my experience with ONE WD drive to counter your argument.

Also, a "ton" is not a suitable quantifier for the sample or population size, unless you're ordering your hard drives by weight. In that case, I'm not surprised that 90% of them fail immediately :D. For the sake of argument though, with a metric "tonne" this works out to about 1666 units at 600 grams per 2-platter hard drive (which is what the WD800 are). This is quite reasonable actually, but still about two orders of magnitude lower than google's.

I was able to find some graphs with HDD failures broken down by manufacturers. The difference between Seagate and WD is a whopping 0.48 percentage points. This might or might not be statistically significant, as no additional information is available. In any case, it's far from impressive. Here's the graph in question. It's based on RMAs from a PC equipment stores, and the whole thing is available here. It's in Russian, but the text doesn't say anything which isn't on the graphs.

I'm not taking this personally at all, and I have no stake in WD whatsoever, only in truth. This probably sounds way too cheesy, but that's what it is. Between the laptops, which mostly came with Hitachi drives, and a bunch of Seagate and Samsung drives in desktops, WD drives probably don't even make up the majority of all HDDs, and that's the only connection I have to WD. Do you work for Seagate, by the way? So far, I'm the only one who tried to use actual numbers and cited any sources (even if you don't like them), so the ball's in your court.

-----------

From another reply:
> I'd also like to quote that, as of right now the *only* message below the post you replied to that has been positively moderated is mine. Obviously I'm not alone in my experiences...

Well to be honest, now I'm really impressed. With the power of slashdot moderation statistics potentially on my side, I could finish my thesis in just a few hours! Anybody knows what's the proper MLA citation format for a slashdot moderation?

Noise Level

[MankyD]

I've always wondered - what's the noise like on a 10k drive? I would think its safe to assume that they're louder, but with smaller platters, who knows. I'm always working to make my machine quieter, and sometimes this seems to come into conflict with making it faster.

Re:Noise Level

[Rakeris]

I have one, and it's very quite. It's makes about the same amount of noise as my 500GB samsung. The only difference is it makes a bit of light "clicking" whenever it's doing a lot of reading/writing.

Re:Noise Level

[skiflyer]

Next to my 7800gt fan I don't even hear the two raptors I have clicking away.

Re:Noise Level

[Sivar]

The first 10KRPM drives sounded like what you'd get when you put ice cubes in a blender. I seriously ducked the first time I heard one start to seek.

The WD Raptor 74GB is alright. I can hear it, but I wouldn't say it's loud or annoying (and I have one of those open Lian-Li cases that have 50000 holes).

This new one is supposed to be one of the quietest drives ever measured.

Re:Noise Level

[mad zambian]

I use a striped pair of 36GB Raptors for my system disk. (Data disk is 3 drive RAID 5) Speed is great, but the little brutes do need active cooling, and are anything but quiet. Maybe it is the pair of them doing synchronous seeks that make them so noisy, who knows? They are the noisiest disks I have used since a pair of 250MB Connors about 15 years ago. Happy with them? Oh hell yes. Next computer will have the same setup, but much more noise damping.

More interesting review

[Sivar]

The review is up on on StorageReview.com . You can use the database to compare this drive to every other drive out there in different kinds of tasks.

Re:More interesting review

[Vigile]

Some of the other reviews to check out:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=548&pid=2
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/the_new_fastest_hard_drive_ever

1 GB/$, ouch

[rubeng]

It's a little better than the current Raptors' 0.88 GB/$, but nowhere close to the 6.25 GB/$ for a Samsung Spinpoint F1. You gotta wonder if a RAID array of cheaper drives wouldn't give you overall better performance, and more than 2x the storage for way less money.

Re:1 GB/$, ouch

[Tumbleweed]

Gee, a super-fast drive costs more per gigabyte than a normal drive. Who woulda thunk it?

You should read some reviews of cars just to make sure a Ferrari costs more per mph than, say, a Ford Focus.

Re:1 GB/$, ouch

[dfn_deux]

Say that 1 expensive drive has a reliability rating of 2u (arbitrary units, where higher is better) and you are advocating using two cheaper drives with a reliability of 1u each, then striping them gives a combined reliability of 1u/2 or .5u... maybe you get performance approaching the 1 expensive disk but at a cost of 75% reliability. Realistically the target market for these drives is deploying them in arrays with parity and spares. I personally don't see any performance increase when going to 2 drives vs a single since, like everyone else doing a job like mine, I'm more concerned with reliability than balls out performance; to wit 2 drives to me never get striped, a single drive is only usable for something non-critical maybe page/swap, 2 drives is always going to be deployed as a mirror pair where I see a bit of an upswing in read perf, 3+ drives will always be an array with 1+ parity drives and 1+ spare drives.

Storage infrastructure is one of those areas of system work where the nut is much harder to crack than most squirrels would realize ;)

Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps

[MosesJones]

If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.

Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.

I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.

Re:Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps

[a_nonamiss]

I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time. Wow... we're almost performing up to the level we were at in 1989.

Re:Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps

[MP3Chuck]

I know you're trying to be funny, but there is such a thing. :)

Raptors? Run!

[Nushio]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors...

Re:Has only one application

[Colonel Korn]

So...this beats the data throughput of any of the 7200 RPM drives by about 50%, and outperforms them in real world benchmarks by about the same, and it does it while consuming LESS power than the WD Green Power drives. It also for the first time comes within about 10% of the speed of a 10k SCSI disk for server-tasks, while using far, far less power. This sounds like a great low end server drive to me, and it's clearly the best single user drive by a large margin. Check out the storagereview.com review, since they actually know what they're doing.

I have no confidence in anything from WD

[jskline]

I've gone through 3 drives now from them for 2 of my 3 laptops. The first one made it 10 months and technically was still under warranty. But because the manufacture date stamp on the drive was more than 12 months, they would not honor my warranty. Yea, I had the receipt but the guy in India was not concerned with that and would only take a credit card number to order another one at full retail price! Screw em'. Drilled a big bad hole through the thing and put in recycle bin.

Two other drives didn't even make it more than a month! First one died after a month and was sent off to them under warranty, and they send another of the exact same drive. It worked quite well up until last week when it just arbitrarily died on the spot when I got into the office.

Mind you my Toshiba's, and Seagate have been outlasting these things hands down. And for the naysayers; I know there is not an issue with the laptops since other vendor drives work quite well and last.

I don't even want to talk about the 3.5" drives! I have had more premature failures with these and I'm officially sworn off of Western Digital. All they make is junk.

Re:I have no confidence in anything from WD

[moosesocks]

Sounds like you're purchasing your drives from a dodgy OEM, especially since all of their laptop drives ship with 3-year warranty.

I suppose this might have been different in the past, though judging a hard drive manufacturer purely based upon anecdotal evidence is a bit flimsy. There are people who say the same thing about every single other hard drive manufacturer out there.

I'll wholeheartedly agree that there can be bad batches of drives (which is most likely what you encountered), though any faults are usually rectified quickly enough that there doesn't seem to be all that huge of a difference across manufacturers when you look at the entire population.

If you've ever managed a computer lab (eg. large number of identical machines), you'll occasionally run into a batch of machines with particularly dodgy power supplies, hard drives, etc..... More interestingly, if you've got a large sample of "identical" machines that were ordered in separate batches, you'll also likely find that the patterns of failure differ somewhat between the two batches.

The only exception to this is that server/enterprise-grade drives tend to be more reliable then their counsumer-grade counterparts. This is why they cost (a lot) more.

Re:Hmm... 2.5"

[WiglyWorm]

Well... the drives have a heatsink on them that bumb them up to 3.25" size. You can take them out, but it will raise the temp on each drive 4-5 degrees C. Plus add the heat from packing them so close together, and I'm not sure that's such a good idea.

Plus, if you take them out of the heatsink, you void the warranty.

Re:Has only one application

[dfghjk]

I would suggest you check out the storagereview.com review since they don't support the claims you are making. In applications benchmarks the margins are far, far less than 50%.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[What Would NPH Do]

Yeah, cause plugging in the power cable and then connecting the SATA cable to the motherboard is just such a hard task. I'm surprised anyone is able to muster the enormous amount of skill that's required by such a task.

Re:Raptors? Run! - apologies to Yakov Smirnoff..

[CdBee]

In corporate America, geeks consume Velociraptors..

Re:You misunderstand

[What Would NPH Do]

I didn't say it was particularly hard in a PC, just that the Mac is much easier. You slide out a little metal tray, put the drive in the tray, slide the tray back in. I do the exact same thing in my PC. It's called a hard drive rack. You can buy them for around 23 dollars on Newegg.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[PopeRatzo]

Uh, actually, hard drive upgrades are easier in the Mac Pro than in any other computer I have ever owned.

You didn't mention that your other computers were DEC Alphas and PDP-3's.

Re:You misunderstand

[What Would NPH Do]

Actually, if you price a Mac Pro vs. a similarly spec'd workstation from Dell, the Apple frequently comes in a few dollars cheaper. That's not really saying much to me as I don't buy anything from Dell. I build my own PCs and cut out the middleman markups.

Apple really does not have a high margin on base Mac Pros, ie without the ridiculous memory upgrade costs. Considering I've spec'd out comparable systems with parts from Newegg and Frys that cost anywhere from 50% to 66% the Mac Pro, I'd say they have a pretty hefty margin.

Re:ARGH! Stupid WD!

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Exactly. It would only be flamebait if you posted something like :
Mac: Hey PC, what are you doing?
PC: Playing a video game.
Mac: Which one?
PC: All of them.

Re:You misunderstand

[What Would NPH Do]

Well I just spec'd out a system that matches (and in many cases surpasses) this $2800 Mac Pro, http://store.apple.com/AppleStore/WebObjects/BizCustom.woa/9794008/wo/YvG4Po3p3yxA2wHk7uDuP4Rzytr/1.?p=0 , and it cost me all of 1300 dollars. So the question becomes, what's that 1500 premium buying me exactly? Looks like a big fat nothing to me.

Re:You misunderstand

[What Would NPH Do]

OS X Don't want. So that's no added value to me. I run Debian on all my boxes.

a nicely made case, Not really. The case I chose was in many was much better looking and more offered more space for upgrades than the one they are selling at least from looking at the pictures they offer.

a well tested set of components (supposedly), Except in the case of the component being explicitly stated I got the exact same thing. So that's no advantage for Apple. In fact that's just highlighting just how much they are trying to rip me off.

direct support for hardware AND software issues from Apple, since they made everything and can't weasel out of support by claiming "it was the other guys stuff that broke!" This is the only thing remotely approaching worth spending more money for, but not 1500 dollars more. Sorry, but you're going to have to convince me much better than that that I should spend a $1500 premium for a Mac Pro versus something I can build myself. In fact I can put that $1500 savings into actually buying a second comparably spec'd machine or I can build a machine that would be even more superior to the comparably priced Mac Pro.

Get yourself a better supplier or transport ..

[freaker_TuC]

I've been buying +300 WD's for over 10 years now; had 2 disks DOA and 4 disks which died later on. Most of the older disks I got stored in a container as extra backup.

One of these disks dying is even my own fault by tilting it while writing.
Also, I've been hearing stories at my suppliers; disks made around JUNE-OCTOBER are mostly the ones with the most problems. I wouldn't know it's a general believe although I'm for sure checking my labels before assigning a disk to a server as precaution to myself.

I've had plenty of other drives dying, IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi. My last 2 crashes were my Powerbook PRO and with an IBM disk.
Had best effects with IBM, WD and Maxtor to be honest. Maybe I was most lucky with WD's? My first choice will always be a WD.

The Western Digital warranty has always been inbetween 3-5 years, so, I really wonder if your supplier was kosher at all?
They got a very fast and extensive warranty program which even allows you to send your front-plate and keep the disk with your precious data.

Re:You misunderstand

[Demolition]

There's no use even making the comparison. You buy what you want because it makes sense for you. Other people buy Mac Pros (or Dells, HPs, or whatever) because they want the warranty, tech support, dealer network, etc. Apple just doesn't see folks like you as part of its market.

Re:Seek Times are what matter

[toddestan]

Seek time is a mechanical thing, the heads can only move so fast. If you want faster seek times and want to spend some money, look into solid state drives. Though granted, all the ones I've seen run at 0 RPM.