Testbed and Methods
We decided to test our Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive in an overclocked platform built around an Intel X38 Express based mainboard with ICH9R South Bridge. This system was equipped with Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 processor working at 4275MHz set as 9.5 x 450MHz and DDR3 SDRAM clocked at 1800MHz. We are going to compare the performance of our VelociRaptor hard drive against a high-speed previous generation solution - WD Raptor X, today’s favorite – Samsung Spinpoint F1, and a pretty popular drive – Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.
After the first few tests it was clear that VelociRaptor is so fast that can easily compete with RAID 0 arrays, too. So, we have also included the results taken from two RAID 0 arrays built from Seagate barracuda 7200.11 and Western Digital Raptor X. We also tested the performance of a RAID 0 array built of two new WD VelociRaptor drives.
As a result, our testbed configuration looked as follows:
- Mainboard: ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38 Express, DDR3 SDRAM);
- CPU: Overclocked Core 2 Duo E8500 (4.275GHz, 450MHz FSB, 6MB, Wolfdale);
- Memory: 2GB Cell Shock DDR3-1800 SDRAM (CS3222580);
- Graphics card: OCZ GeForce 8800GTX;
- Hard drives:
- Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD502IJ (500GB);
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3320613AS (320GB);
- Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD (150GB);
- Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS (300GB).
- PSU: SilverStone SST-ST85ZF.
The tests were performed in Windows Vista x86. The HDDs were connected to the controller embedded into ICH9R that worked in AHCI/RAID mode. We used Intel driver version 8.2.0.1001. The Strip Size for RAID 0 arrays was set at 32KB.
