Velociraptor

Windows i7 920 said:

I have a few programs that could REALLY benefit from a faster drive, but I don't want to go with an SSD for several reasons. Currently I have a WD drive with 7200 RPM 16 MB cache. How much faster would this drive be?

Newegg.com - Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

My belated 2¢:

Performance would depend on your application. The VelociRaptor would have less latency. A 10,000 RPM drive has a 3 ms average rotational latency. For 7200 RPM, it's 4.17 ms. (It's the time for the platter to make 1/2 turn.) The Velociraptor has a quicker mechanism to position its heads, so its seek time would be lower.

On the other hand, the Caviar Black drives have a much higher data density on their platters, so their sustained data read (or write) rates may be better than the Raptor. I suggest the 1.5TB Caviar Black:

Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1501FASS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

It's $10 cheaper at Newegg than the 150GB Raptor. I have one. I don't find it noisy.

Maybe you'd get some insight by checking the data base at www.storageview.com. A quick glance suggests that you'd be giving up little performance with a Caviar Black as compared to a VelociRaptor.

The WDC 10kRPM drives seem to be a unique technology, but SSDs seem to be what the world is moving to. There's a vast range in data rates (especially write rates) with them, but their 100 microsecond latencies make it hard for traditional drives to compete.

bobkn said:

On the other hand, the Caviar Black drives have a much higher data density on their platters, so their sustained data read (or write) rates may be better than the Raptor. I suggest the 1.5TB Caviar Black

Your comments, and remarks about it being application-dependent, all make perfect sense.

But for an OS C-drive application, I doubt that these "sustained data read/write" conditions occur very often. Use the drive as a \Recorded TV folder for WMC and the Ceton 4-tuner card supporting multiple extenders and HDTV's around the house, and I would vote for the drive with the largest cache and highest data rates. The Velociraptor only has 16MB cache.

I still love them for my OS drive.


Had an interesting incident over the weekend. One machine began to malfunction severely, freezing, locking up, even several BSOD (which I have NEVER seen in my 15 months experience with Win7 on two separate machines). Couldn't boot reliably, with indications that the 150GB boot SATA drive (i.e. this one that we're talking about) was failing... either that or maybe the particular SATA port on the motherboard was flaking out, or who knows what.

After hours of playing and coaxing, and even "rebuild MBR on the drive" (using my standalone Partition Wizard boot disk) which didn't fix anything, I was able to get it to come up long enough for me to actually copy the one crucial data partition on the drive to another drive where I had sufficient capacity to shrink one partition enough (making it "unallocated") so that I could use Partition Wizard to copy the crucial partition on the presumably failing boot drive to the "backup" copy location.

Having accomplished that, I was now able to delete everything on the maybe-failing drive, and then attempt a Win7 recovery from the system-image I'd last taken (which wasn't so long ago, and was perfectly fine as a starting point if I had to re-do recent work). Well this didn't go so well, with lots of failures again seemingly tied to hardware failing.

I even tried to reinstall Win7 on the drive, but the installation failed as well.. claiming it couldn't copy (or find?) all needed files. That couldn't be coming from the CD, so it must have been more hardware failures.

Anyway, eventually I managed to get the system image to recover successfully. In fact the drive now seemed to be working properly again. Just because I thought it was the drive itself that was failing, I placed my own new order for another one (on Amazon, as I recommended earlier, for $89). The order was placed Sunday night, confirmed and shipped Monday morning (regular USPS, expected 3-5 day arrival), and arrived this morning TUESDAY!!!

However yesterday, on Monday morning, I got another BSOD out of the blue! It was seemingly doing nothing, just sitting there, and all of a sudden DEATH! Again, more suggestion of a tempermental intermittent failure, with true fatal death soon to arrive.

I then decided just to look inside the case, not expecting to find anything unusual. After all, these parts just sit there screwed into cages and connected with power/data cables. They don't actually move around.

Nevertheless, I unplugged both the power and data cables, and then re-attached them, pushing them on firmly (just as they were originally). I also pushed down the other end of the cables into the SATA connector on the MOBO and the extension cable coming from the power supply. Just to be sure.

Then I re-booted.

Amazingly, it has been 100% perfect since Monday morning!!! I honestly don't think either of the cable connections was loose, but perhaps one may have been. How it got that way after so long of perfect operation, I have no idea. All I know is that ever since I removed and re-seated those two cable connections to the drive, it's been like a new drive. Perfect, once again. Not a hiccup since Monday.

So naturally, I now have a "spare" Velociraptor still in the unopened carton, which arrived just this morning from Amazon. I think I'll just keep it. The price is too good to have passed up anyway, even for just having it as a true "spare" (or maybe again the boot drive in some third new machine which might get created some day).

Very interesting. Would never have dreamed that either cable could possibly have worked its way loose just the tiniest amount, in order to result in the completely unpredictable and erratic behavior of the drive that I saw all weekend. From my perspective the cables are now re-attached exactly as they were before... but obviously not.

A review from Silent PC reviews of the WDC Caviar Black 1TB 3Gb/s drive.

On the last page are sound clips of it, the raptor, and the blue. With and without Auto Acoustic Management set to silent.

Just about what I hear on the Black and Blue.

Caviar Black: WD's Performance 1TB HDD | silentpcreview.com

dsperber said:

So naturally, I now have a "spare" Velociraptor still in the unopened carton, which arrived just this morning from Amazon. I think I'll just keep it.

Very interesting. Would never have dreamed that either cable could possibly have worked its way loose just the tiniest amount, in order to result in the completely unpredictable and erratic behavior of the drive that I saw all weekend. From my perspective the cables are now re-attached exactly as they were before... but obviously not.

Post script...

I'm now of the opinion that it really wasn't the cable or connector. I'm now of the opinion that my drive was truly dying a slow death. I gave it a shot of adrenaline with the cable re-seating, but really the drive was doomed.

Yesterday it started acting up again, just as it had before. I decided enough was enough, and broke out the "spare" drive I'd purchased some weeks back but never installed at that time.

Fortunately, I had right-up-to-the minute "system image" backup, along with similar 100% current backups of the other partitions on that physical drive. I was able to swap the bum drive out in 30 minutes for the new replacement, re-boot and restore the "system image" in about 15 minutes, restore the other partitions in about 10 minutes, and inside of an hour total I was running rock-solid perfect again with a new WDC150 Velociraptor.

This drive is simply unbelievably quiet (at least in my Acousticase, which has two other hard drives in it along with super-silent front and rear 120mm case fans, a very large and silent Zalman cooler on the CPU, super-silent Nesteq power supply, and a fanless ATI HD4670 video card).

Love it (and Win7's "system image" functionality).

Id go with 2 1tb spinpoint f3's in raid0, costs less than that one WD velociraptor and has almost 7x the capacity! Here are my hddtune results, theyre faster than my 1st gen vertex 2:

I suspect the real issue here is IDE vs. RAID.

On my ASUS P5Q3 board, I have my SATA configuration as IDE. Each of SATA my drives is thus limited by UDMA5, aka ATA100. I get the same performance on my Supermicro C2SBX board.

No matter what the SATA drives are theoretically rated at speed-wise, if you run them as IDE drives then they're limited to ATA100 performance.

how about this one

a hybrid hard disk

Momentus XT | 7200 RPM | Seagate

dsperber said:

Post post script...

I'm now of the opinion that it really wasn't the cable or connector. I'm now of the opinion that my drive was truly dying a slow death. I gave it a shot of adrenaline with the cable re-seating, but really the drive was doomed.

Yesterday it started acting up again, just as it had before. I decided enough was enough, and broke out the "spare" drive I'd purchased some weeks back but never installed at that time.

Grrr...

Tonight it acted up again, exactly as it had before! This is the brand new drive, installed just last week.

Same symptom... SATA port 4 (to which that drive is connected) suddenly disappeared from BIOS sensing. And none of my usual "coaxing" methods could bring it back.

I decided to move the cable to another SATA port (#2, which is right next to #4), just in case it really was a failing SATA connector on the motherboard.

Once I did that, sure enough the drive was now sensed again and I was back in business. Fingers crossed this is the final and permanent solution.


So, looks like I threw out what probably was a perfectly good Velociraptor last week, if it was the SATA port 4 connector all along that was the flaky component.

Oh well. Alls well that ends well. Fingers crossed.

Just one more [hopefully] final postscript to this story.

Remarkably, the very same symptom started up again! Just spontaneously, having been running for several months with no problem!

At first, I tried to avoid HIBERNATE since I had previously seemed to have more success if I just let the machine run 24/7 (although I didn't want to), and didn't recycle the power supply. Unfortunately, this now trick seemed to be having no luck in overcoming the now constant problem.

Also, as usual, I went through the same assorted "kick the tires" tricks I'd been having succes with, such as moving the SATA cable to yet another motherboard connector (although I'd now run through all 5 which were theoretically available, since the sixth was already happily and successfully use for another SATA drive, and I didn't want to disturb it), pulling the power and SATA cable from the drive end, even changing to yet another SATA cable. Powering the machine down, powering it up, getting into the BIOS, getting out of the BIOS, etc. Everything I could think of to "wake up the drive", which was I was still convinced was perfectly fine.

But for some reason, with this particular episode I just couldn't coax it back to life. But I was not about to replace this drive again, as I'd rushed-to-judgement the last time and replaced my prior drive with this one.

Then, quite by accident, I was inside the case pulling some neighboring cables aside, to see if I could get access to the hardest-to-see #6 SATA connector on the mobo to try it out. And amazingly, as I was pulling the cables away, the OTHER END OF THE POWER ADAPTER CABLE simply swung free!

I am using a short maybe 3" MOLEX(M)-to-SATA(M) power adapter cable, to plug the MOLEX end into a spare MOLEX(F) connector on a cable coming out of my power supply and then connect the SATA end onto the drive. Well, apparently the MOLEX(F) connector and MOLEX(M) end were not a perfect fit. In fact, they were kind of loose. Normally these two connectors will "snap" together when you push them together firmly, to hold them locked securely. In this case not only were they not "snapping" coupled, but there didn't seem to be enough friction on the 4-pins to keep them really snuggly together, in order to make sure that all 4 pins were conducting properly.

Anyway, I kicked myself for not thinking of that all these past months of having the same problem. So this time I very carefully re-attached the two MOLEX connectors firmly and securely, re-routing it so that it was no longer located where it was, and in fact was buried nicely in a nest of other cables for physical support. I probably should have gone out and bought another adapter, but I was convinced this minor adjustment would do the trick.

Close everything up, re-boot... and VOILA!!! Perfect! Drive is now back to life!

What a dummy I am. I was only looking at the cable connectors going into the drive, and onto the motherboard, and not ever thinking about the other end of the power adapter cable that connected to the main MOLEX power supply cable.

Oh well. I truly hope this case is now closed permanently! And I still feel the Velociraptor is an excellent and almost silent drive, that I'm very happy with.