your thoughts on velocirapter

[Terbinator]

Don't keep totally up to date but the cream of the crop used to be the Intel Gen2 80gb HD, but their are a few new ones using the sandforce controller, being the corsair force series and the crucial C300.

Crucial uses Marvell AFAIK.

[Sputnik]

I did say I read it a while back!

I was just reading this as I am looking at the Samsung F3 for my computer and it seems to outperform the velociraptor ( I was suprised too) so you may be better saving your money or going for an SSD.

I had an original 74GB raptor and the 1TB F3 easily out performed it. Like others have said, If you want the speed buy an SSD or make the compromise between speed and capacity and buy a 1TB drive.

[aidanjt]

For some strange reason I feel compelled to repeat myself:

Remember, F3s are *nowhere* near VR's in terms of access/seek times. It's a bit like throwing two cars off a cliff and proclaiming that because they explode off the bottom off the cliff at the same time both cars perform equally.

The VR utterly crushes the F3 in every real world scenario you can imagine.

[pipTheGeek]

For some strange reason I feel compelled to repeat myself:


The VR utterly crushes the F3 in every real world scenario you can imagine.

And it appears is several important benchmarks.
Figures from tomshardware HDD charts.

Average Read Throughput
Samsung f3 = 115.8 MB/s
600GB VR = 131.7 MB/s

Average Write Throughput
Samsung F3 = 115.3 MB/s
600GB VR = 130.4 MB/s

Average Read Seek
Samsung F3 = 13.6 ms
600GB VR = 7 ms

I'm still not convinced that this is going to translate to any noticable performance improvement for anything but the most IO intensive of tasks.

[ehhhhhhh]

I had a 300GB HLFS Velociraptor and it does not worth the price premium.

It's not faster than any proper HDD (e.g. WD black)
even if some becnhmark show a little bit of difference then you still won't notice anything...not to mention the awful noise it can produce.


btw, if you compare a very old Velociraptor to a new 1TB hdd, it's no wonder slower....the performance of the old raptors equals to a new 5400rpm laptop drive...(the tech is advancing, haha)

I would pick a 80GB intel G2 which is relatively cheap and you will notice the difference.

I reckon they will stop the whole vr thing as there's no sane person who would buy one (furthermore WD entered the SSD market a while ago)

also, If you want to stay with mechanical drives then it makes more sense to stripe 2 good HDDs, it will outperform the VR and it provides some (not much) visible results for cheaper.

[aidanjt]

btw, if you compare a very old Velociraptor to a new 1TB hdd, it's no wonder slower....the performance of the old raptors equals to a new 5400rpm laptop drive...(the tech is advancing, haha)

Uhh, no, it doesn't. Not even remotely close.

also, If you want to stay with mechanical drives then it makes more sense to stripe 2 good HDDs, it will outperform the VR and it provides some (not much) visible results for cheaper.

So not only do you go with one cheaper, less reliable disk, you go with two, and stripe them all in the hope that you *might* beat synthetic benchmarks and still fail in real world performance? You must really hate your data.

[ehhhhhhh]

Uhh, no, it doesn't. Not even remotely close.

yes it does, I'll dig up the review. I think it was on anandtech.

So not only do you go with one cheaper, less reliable disk, you go with two, and stripe them all in the hope that you *might* beat synthetic benchmarks and still fail in real world performance? You must really hate your data.

I have an active / decent backup software , so it does not really matter if one of the drives fail....actually you need to have the same backup strategy if you have 1 HDD.

so no, I don't hate my data...


ps: I don't care about benchmarks...I decided to stay with the current config after trying 1 velociraptor....btw I'm planning to use my 2 blacks in a mirror too if the SSD prices go down...(evil grin)

[marktime]

VR 600gb v Vertex 2E

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/152?vs=182

[marktime]

Sorry for double post - this link should work.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Produ...81.82.83.85.86

[Sputnik]

...not to mention the awful noise it can produce.

I forgot about that but, mine were the early ones not Velociraptors. So I can't say if they improved or not.

[aidanjt]

Velocirapter's 'awful' noise.

[ehhhhhhh]

I did not find the original review, though this is a good read:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3636/w...gb-and-600gb/8

and this thread has a single 74GB raptor benchmarked, (comment on 11-21-2009, 01:07 PM):

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1284410&page=16

I believe it is clearly visible that these old drives are so slow in terms of performance that they're not even worth to mention...


edit: aidanjt, I see you have 2 of them...sorry, I did not mean to hurt your feelings...though I think it's not a good thing to be so bound with a piece of hardware...almost all of them become obsolete in months...

[mikerr]

Here's a quote from that article:

The rest of the tests make it very clear. As far as [non-SSD] hard drives go, you can't beat the random read/write performance of the new VelociRaptor.

The problem is once you take into account SSD. The new VelociRaptor boasts a 4KB random write speed of 1.9MB/s. Intel's X25-M G2 is amost 20x faster. The new VelociRaptor averages 178 IOPS in our typical Bench workload, Intel's X25-M can push nearly 800 IOPS in the same test.

you just can't ignore that SSDs have taken over as performance drives now.

[Antagram]

Velocirapter's 'awful' noise.

Apart from the cost, the noise uncertainty always put me off. Especially being in a thin aluminium case on the desk.

I was considering this bay adapter as per SPCR review as available on Chillblast, as ebuyer sell the WD3000BLFS that should exclude the icepack. But would need a sealed unit really to get around that noise.

As for people saying the Velociraptors are slow. I always understood it was access time you are paying for instead of raw transfer speed that results in snappier actions.

[ehhhhhhh]

Here's a quote from that article:


you just can't ignore that SSDs have taken over as performance drives now.

yeah, this was one of the reasons I've linked it.