Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS Hard Disk Drive Review

Our Tests

As you could see in the previous page, we measured performance using three different programs, DiskSpeed 32, HD Tach and HD Tune.

Obs: We made a mistake when we first published this review on 06/10/2008: we forgot to remove the compatibility jumper from our Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drives, making them to work as SATA-150 devices instead of SATA-300 ones. We redid the benchmarking and the results were very different (higher performance with the jumper removed), so this page and the conclusions had to be completely rewritten. We ask our most sincere apologies for this error and we’d like to thank our reader Carvalhoso who pointed out this error to us.

Let’s first analyze the results achieved with DiskSpeed32.

On DiskSpeed32 our RAID0 array using two mainstream Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard disk drives achieved a burst rate 37% higher than VelociRaptor’s and 55% higher than our Barracuda 7200.10 drive installed alone. VelociRaptor, however, achieved a higher maximum and average transfer rates. Its maximum transfer rate was 28% higher than our RAID0 array and 67% higher than only one Barracuda 7200.10 installed, while its average transfer rate was only 8% higher than our RAID0 array and 68% higher than our single Barracuda 7200.10.

On HD Tach our RAID0 array achieved a higher performance than the new VelociRaptor, with a 34% higher burst transfer rate and with an average transfer rate 8% higher. VelociRaptor achieved burst rate 11% higher than Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 and an average transfer rate 68% higher than the one achieved by this mainstream drive.

HD Tune showed our VelociRaptor with a burst transfer rate 40% higher than our RAID0 array, but on this program our single Barracuda 7200.10 achieved a burst transfer rate 25% higher than two of them in RAID0. Our RAID0 array also achieved a higher maximum (5%) and average (6%) transfer rates. As you can see the differences weren’t that big. VelociRaptor achieved a maximum transfer rate 60% higher than the one achieved by our mainstream Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drive, while its average transfer rate was 68% higher.