WD Raptor 150GB HDD Performance Investigated

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 01/20/2006 | 11:08 AM ]

Almost every PC user knows that one of the biggest bottlenecks in contemporary computers are their hard disk drives (HDDs). To minimize the impact on system’s overall performance, operating systems as well as driver are written to predict and preload data from HDD. Another approach in increasing the performance is building faster spinning HDDs with smaller access time.

Western Digital Raptor HDD line-up is considered to be the fastest Serial ATA HDD offering on the market. Until recently the only available models boasted capacity of 36GB and 74GB. To meet the demand for bigger storage space, WD has released the newest member of Raptor HDDs family.

The new drive boasts with 150GB capacity, 10 000rpm rotational speed, 16MB cache, 4.6ms read seek time, 5.2ms write seek time and average latency of 2.99ms. For the first time WD Raptor 150GB uses two platters with 80GB capacity (formatted at 75GB) instead of 40GB (formatted as 37GB) platters that were used for Raptor 36GB and Raptor 74GB models. The new Raptor drive also offers random I/O performance with native command queuing (NCQ), which increases performance by intelligently ordering multiple simultaneous read and write commands. WD Raptor is reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments and is backed by a five-year warranty.

Since WD Raptor HDDs are highly praised by computer enthusiasts, GamePC web-site took a pair of WD Raptor 150GB HDDs and run a number of data transfer intensive benchmarks to determine the performance level of the newborn Raptors.

“In terms of raw performance, the Raptor 150 is unbeatable at this point. Most new Serial ATA-II/300 class 7,200 RPM hard drives can push around 50-55 MB/s sustained transfer rates, whereas the Raptor 74 GB could push around 65 MB/s. The Raptor 150 GB one ups them all, maxing out at around 77 MB/s for a single drive, and improvement of roughly 18% over their previous generation product. Write speeds are improved as well, as our previous page of benchmarks showed. Take a few of these drives in RAID-0, and you have some heavy duty enterprise class storage. With four disks in RAID-0 we were able to push over 300 MB/s of sustained data read speed. Simply an amazing amount of storage power at one’s fingertips,” concludes GamePC.

• GamePC: Taking A Test Spin: Western Digital’s Raptor 150 GB with RAID-0.