Western Digital Raptor 150: a test
par
Lionel
- 16/01/2006
Introduction
Since its official release at the beginning of this month, we were really eager to test the Raptor 150, also known as WD1500A. According to its specs, this HD appears as the best SATA HD on the market. First, it is the only HD with a rotation speed of 10,000 rpm. It also features 16MB of cache, whereas its little brother, Raptor 74, only sports 8MB, and it has exceptional data transfer speed and access time.
From the external point of view, this HD looks like other HDs, except some blades around the case that are designed to improve the heat releasing.
Most of the websites will look at the performance of this HDs, giving numbers that will not really translate into a real world evaluation for the end user. We have decided to perform our test in an MacOSX environment that will be closer to an every day use. In real conditions of use, our HDs mostly read and write small files rather than large ones. So the access time and the cache size are the two main factors important for such purposes, the data transfer speed is only marginally affecting the final result.
Tests have been performed on a PMG5 Quad 2.5 GHz, sporting 7 GB of DDR2 RAM (CAS 4-4-4), and running Mac OS X 10.4.4.
As a reference drive we used a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 with a storage capacity of 300 GB and 16 MB of cache. Remember that this reference drive is better than original one normally shipping with the PMG5 Quad, so the performance gain due to the Raptor would be even greater.
In order to have the same system environment, we cloned the same system on both drive using Personal Backup X4 . Pure HD test have been performed using Quickbench
Tests have been performed independently for each drive (including booting), except for the pure HD performance test for which we have booted from an external drive in order to minimize the effect related to OSX tasks (mostly file modification in background).
Most tests have been repeated 3 times, keeping in each case the best result. When the test could be biased by data being stored into the cache, the computer was rebooted. The most time-consuming test was repeated only twice, but due to the length of this evaluation, impact of background systems tasks is minimal.
Since its official release at the beginning of this month, we were really eager to test the Raptor 150, also known as WD1500A. According to its specs, this HD appears as the best SATA HD on the market. First, it is the only HD with a rotation speed of 10,000 rpm. It also features 16MB of cache, whereas its little brother, Raptor 74, only sports 8MB, and it has exceptional data transfer speed and access time.
From the external point of view, this HD looks like other HDs, except some blades around the case that are designed to improve the heat releasing.
Most of the websites will look at the performance of this HDs, giving numbers that will not really translate into a real world evaluation for the end user. We have decided to perform our test in an MacOSX environment that will be closer to an every day use. In real conditions of use, our HDs mostly read and write small files rather than large ones. So the access time and the cache size are the two main factors important for such purposes, the data transfer speed is only marginally affecting the final result.
Tests have been performed on a PMG5 Quad 2.5 GHz, sporting 7 GB of DDR2 RAM (CAS 4-4-4), and running Mac OS X 10.4.4.
As a reference drive we used a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 with a storage capacity of 300 GB and 16 MB of cache. Remember that this reference drive is better than original one normally shipping with the PMG5 Quad, so the performance gain due to the Raptor would be even greater.
In order to have the same system environment, we cloned the same system on both drive using Personal Backup X4 . Pure HD test have been performed using Quickbench
Tests have been performed independently for each drive (including booting), except for the pure HD performance test for which we have booted from an external drive in order to minimize the effect related to OSX tasks (mostly file modification in background).
Most tests have been repeated 3 times, keeping in each case the best result. When the test could be biased by data being stored into the cache, the computer was rebooted. The most time-consuming test was repeated only twice, but due to the length of this evaluation, impact of background systems tasks is minimal.
