WESTERN DIGITAL
VELOCIRAPTOR 600GB HDD
RRP: $279.99 | Website: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=821
Test Machine
• Intel i7 960
• Gigabyte X58-UD7
• Western Digital
VelociRaptor 600GB SATA3
• Western Digital
VelociRaptor 300GB SATA2
• ATI Radeon 5870 Catalyst
10.2
• Antec 1200OC PSU
• Noctua NH-U12P
• Windows 7 32-bit
N
ot too long ago,
Motherboard manufactures
made a big deal about SATA3,
encouraging enthusiasts to
buy a board supporting this
standard. We did a big feature
article at the time evaluating
the technology and we found
that there was much hype but
not much real world value
even for overclockers. As more
drives continue to support the
standard it was time to have
a look at the fastest Western
Digital VelociRaptor 600GB
drive, which supports the newer
interface. We wanted to find out
not only about its performance
but if it can truly take advantage
of the SATA3 Interface.
Analysis
Immediately we saw that the
new SATA3 incarnation of the
Velociraptor is an impressive
22 MB/s faster in read and 17
MB/s faster in write speeds over
its older SATA 3Gbps version. A
good start, but it has to be said
that, we were expecting a little
bit more from this SATA3 disk; it
is quite possible that magnetic
drives are a major bottleneck
for the Interface.
Taking a look at a few more
results we observed some
interesting numbers in random
operations, with a 25% gain in
24 The OverClocker October 2010
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