WD VelociRaptor 300GB HDD vs SSD

Laptop use?

Ok so i'm on a laptop, currently trundling along at a whopping 5400rpm.

Do I go SSD or 7200rpm?

As long as the size is over 60gb I'm not to fussed, my two concerns are battery power and speed. I don't want something sucking up all my juice yet I don't want to have to wait a year for an 8gb rar collection to... unrar

Chris McFaul

Heat or power issues? If I read the review properly, it seemed to indicate that the VelociRaptor drew little power (compared to the 3.5" drives, granted) and rarely became anything more than warm. This suggest that it shouldn't be a problem - aside from the size issue.

Great advert...

...for the Hiatchi drive. I want one of them!

SSD

Well, apart from using poor Americanisms "you'd likely need a regular hard drive ", the main thing you miss out is that better SSDs are already on the market.

SSD write performance can be fairly good, although it's fair to say you'll pay a price.

You also didn't pick up on the fact that SSDs don't seem to use less electricity contrary to what we were first led to believe.

Old

Isnt that hitatchi drive getting on a bit? I believe the samsung F1 Drives have much better performance? similar to that of a velociRaptor. for the same price you could RAID 0 two samsungs, it would be interesting to see how that affects things?

even better they could compare the velociraptor to a decent SSD?

SSD performance

Why did the SSD score *that* low on PCMark compared to the others? From the other charts, there didn't seem to be such a large difference - especially considering that the main "real life" test, booting Windows, was won by the SSD.

building a Media Centre PC??????

Unless your media center PC renders Shrek real-time from the source, I would propose that a couple of the Hitachis provide more storage at a lower price. Even if you encase them in sound dampers.

HDD performance is a bit of a non-issue for media center PCs, so I would see no reason to pay for premium disks like the *raptors

Media centre PCs

"HDD performance is a bit of a non-issue for media center PCs, so I would see no reason to pay for premium disks like the *raptors"

I think depends on whether your media centre PC is just going to be a playback device, or if you are going to be doing a lot of encoding/transcoding of home videos for youtube, CDs, etc - or encoding DVDs to iPhone/phone format where a chunky HDD [or two, or four working in an array] can be useful.

I have a pair of old Spinpoints in RAID0 for doing video processing and playing games on my old workhorse box, makes a difference when it comes to working with big video files - or games with a large footprint - in my relatively limited experience at least.

Steven R

@Steven Raith

All good points (a member of the RAID0 choir myself for those reasons), but why would a "classic" media centre PC be doing encoding/transcoding. The whole point of a 'classic' media centre is that it *is* "just going to be a playback device".

To be honest though, have never really seen the point of the pure media centre PCs though (i.e. the small quiet devices under the TV) - just get a PS3/XBox360 as a media extender from the workhorse in the office. Works like a charm, normally cheaper, easier to use and quiet (XBox aside...)

Crucial SSD not exactly fast....

I spent several days last month comparing SSDs for one of our servers and discovered VERY quickly that there is a huge range of speeds in the things with some running at half (or slower) the speed of an average 7200rpm hard drive and others running significantly faster than an average 7200rpm drive.

Crucial SSD drives were notably down at the slow end of the pack, with Samsung drives among the leaders.

This effectively means you're not really comparing apples with apples.

Is there any chance of benchmarking a Samsung 128Gb SSD or other fast SSD array and publishing the results?

SSDs

I used the Crucial SSD as it was what I had to hand - I don't have a sample of the OCZ despite asking but when I get one you'll read about it.

I've reviewed the Intel SSD and expect it to go up very soon and then you'll see how a proper SSD performs ...

In an ideal world we would have majored on VelociRaptor vs Raptor but the fact of the matter is that Raptor is now rather old and didn't compare especially well to the Hitachi 7K1000 which is indeed a peach and offers superb value for money.

HD size?

Not sure about you guys, but unless you have around 30-50 games you regularly play, gaming PCs simply don't need the hard capacity of a PC devoted to media.

Nothing wrong with having more HD space of course, but not if it comes at the cost of speed.

Of course gamers could be using their computers for other things, in which case most would opt for a second drive on it's own channel.

However most gamers I know would take a 30gb drive (or even less) if they knew it offered even an imperceptible increase in frame rate or an unnoticeable decrease in load times.

As long as it had the capacity to hold the 1/2 dozen games they regularly play while still maintaining 40-50% free space, they'd be happy.

Second drives are for media, bothersome office applications or whatever else people do when they aren't playing games. And it better be on its own channel, if it even so much as looks at my main hd, it'll be out of the PC and sitting in the corner thinking about what it did.

@Adrian

I thought OCZ SSDs are effectively rebadged Samsung devices. Is it the OCZ logo that makes them pants?