With the show case of the new wave of SDD (solid state drives) with their ability of having an almost non-existent latency timings being able to go down as 0.1ns in the Intel X25 SDD drive because of no mechanical devices present in the SDD giving it a near fast timing. And also the ability to have a consistent read and write speed of above 100MB/s so with the combination of near existent latency and twice as fast read and write speeds make is a good alternative to the heat-producing and also slower hard-drives but still playing with the prize the SDD is a top of the line for fast storage available.
Enter Western Digital with its line of Raptor high speed hard disks, which have long been a staple of high performance PCs by offering significantly improved drive speeds over more traditional hard disks. With the release of the 4th generation of Raptor hard drive, cleverly renamed VelociRaptor (we see what you did there), does Western Digital have enough to challenge the new breed of SSDs vying for its market position, or will the VelociRaptor come in and take over the pack? Just the other day I was asked if there was anything quicker than a 1TB drive without splashing out the GDP of a South American country on an SSD. That’s the essence of a true PC enthusiast – always looking for that extra bit of performance but without having to rob a bookie’s to bankroll the upgrade and there’s clearly a gap in the storage market between mechanical drives and premium SSDs.
As the VelociRaptor occupies that middle ground between capacity mechanical drives and SSDs it’s hardly surprising to find its Vista boot time is squarely in between the two kinds of drives, knocking a solid eight seconds off of the Samsung F1 1TB’s time but still lagging over eighteen seconds behind even the slowest SSD. Just as with the Vista boot test, the VelociRaptor finds itself squarely between the mechanical drives and the SSDs when it comes to loading Crysis, with an average time of 34.6 seconds 2.5 seconds faster than the Samsung but a full four seconds slower than the slowest SSD.
On the whole, the Raptor finds itself trapped between two increasingly impressive fields of competition, and we can’t help but think it’s starting to feel the squeeze. As mechanical hard drives become larger and faster thanks to increasing platter densities (we’ll be reviewing Western Digital’s whopping 2TB Green hard disk in the next week or so) and high performance SSDs become more and more affordable, the Raptor’s market is starting to shrink and it’s become a much less convincing option for the performance minded techie than its predecessors once were.
