Hard Drive comparisons

[Toronto122]

So I have 4 hard drives...

1 Western Digital 300gb VelocRaptor
1 Western Digital 1 Terrabyte Caviar Black
2 Western Digital WD6400AAKS drives in RAID 0

All three drives are VERY quiet, contrary to what you may have heard about the VRaptor, I can't hear it.

Here are the three HD Tune Pro benchmarks:

VRaptor: This is the super tuned rice burner of the bunch...


WD 1Terrabyte Caviar Black: Fast storage drive, good and reliable


WD640AAKS RAID 0: This is the Muscle car of the bunch, very even speed across the board with no drop off at the inner edges of the platter...


If I could do it again, I wouldn't go with the VRaptor, I'd just use the WD640's and I'd short stroke them for the OS.

So I guess this isn't really a review, more a summary of 3 really good drives, maybe this will help some people make some buying decisions.

Thanks for reading.

[Jake_HT]

Nice, the caviar black really pulls it's weight. Much better purchase decision compared to the velociraptor (not trying to offend you )

I'm kinda surprised at how low your RAID 0 reading was? I have 2 of those same drives (the 320gb versions) and here's my result... using a different tool yes but the difference shouldn't be this drastic

WD 3200AAKS (Caviar blue 320GB SE16) in RAID 0 (2 drives)



And single WD 6400AAKS (Caviar blue 640GB SE16) Single drive.

Maybe I got gems? I've been kinda lucky I got a good chip also..

[Toronto122]

I'll go home later and run HD Tach on them and see what it says.

Damn THAT'S FAST!!!
good job!!!!

[Toronto122]

ok...I give up...how did you do it?

I just re-ran the test with HD-Tach on my 640 RAID and only got 139mb/s!!

How did you do that?
Are there some settings I don't know about?

[Triggz]

Thanks for the info! Good thread for people who think they NEED velociraptors.

Im about to order a WD 640GB Caviar Black (WD6401AALS) to go in the new rig (x2 in the near future). This just sealed the deal! If you go to shopbot.ca and type in WD6401AALS you can find one for $91 at directcanada.com. And for some reason it mentions nothing of an OEM. If you scroll down a bit further on the shopbot list, you will notice the OEM version at directcanada for $100??? Im going to add the $91 to my cart and hope it is retail.

[CMetaphor]

Those raid 0 results are very much on the slow side. In general, from my experience, two $60-70 hard drives can easily outperform a V-raptor and cost less as well. I'll post up my raid 0 Hd tune in a minute....

[CMetaphor]

Here we are, HD Tach result on my 2x Seagate 500Gb 7200.11 drives in Raid 0 (two platters each):


You should probably run some tests to see why you have such slow performance from your raid 0....

Edit: FYI. These are the older Seagate 500Gb drives. The newer ones (7200.11) are supposedly even faster and have only 1 platter each.

[Jake_HT]

I think my results are just barely above normal... I think with a RAID 0 with those SE16 drives you should expect about 160mb/sec. What size stripe did you use? I used the default 128k. Yours should be getting faster results!
My single drive, however, is smokin'! I think I got lucky there.

[CMetaphor]

Originally Posted by Jake_HT

I think my results are just barely above normal... I think with a RAID 0 with those SE16 drives you should expect about 160mb/sec. What size stripe did you use? I used the default 128k. Yours should be getting faster results!

I think your drives could actually go even faster than that jake_ht. Single platter drives should be quicker in general than two or three platter drives. I think your cluster size is a bit too big actually. With two defragmented drives and a 64k cluster size, I think your speeds would improve some more!

[Jake_HT]

Originally Posted by CMetaphor

I think your drives could actually go even faster than that jake_ht. Single platter drives should be quicker in general than two or three platter drives. I think your cluster size is a bit too big actually. With two defragmented drives and a 64k cluster size, I think your speeds would improve some more!

That very well could be true.. I just don't know enough about the stripe sizes and what the drawbacks of a smaller one is, although I knew they were a bit faster..
I don't feel like re-formatting AGAIN
But yeah they are single platter, and work well.