Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB and Western Digital Black 4TB Hard Disk Review
poor poor 16 Dec 2012
The traditional hard disk isn’t obsolete. If you thought it would be, it is still around and has served users beyond the expected life span. In fact, my first SSD was dead within a year but my desktop HDD from Western Digital is stil running right now.
Western Digital has 4 series of desktop/workstation hard drives. They are the Blue series WD Blue which offers solid performance an d realiability for everyday computing. It ranges from 80GB to 1TB. The other series which is environmental friendly is the Cool and Quiet WD Green. It has storage capacities of 500GB to 3 TB.
The WD Black series has the highest capacity range from 500GB to 4TB and offers maximum performance for power computing. It has a 32MB – 64MB cache and 5 years warranty.
The WD VelociRaptor, the highest end is more suitable for workstation. It comes in the capacity of 250GB to 1TB and in form factor of 2.5 and 3.5inches. It has a 64MB cache and runs at a high speed of 10,000 RPM.
Both WD Black and WD VelociRaptor has 5 years warranty.
Today, we will take a look at two products from Western Digital, the high speed Western Digital 1TB VelociRaptor & the WD Black 4TB 3.5inch.
Both hard disks are high performance drives, one with speed while the other with high capacity.
I recently upgraded my old poor PC with a 500G Western Digital WD5000AAKB drive (old PATA, 7200 RPM, 16MB cache) and it is quiet and fast, albeit secondhand drive. So looks like that for high capacity AND time reliability the classic HDDs are here to stay.
On the second hand, I did not managed to get my SSD working using PATA/SATA converter in another old lazy Dell PC (Dell OptiPlex GX110, 1GHz PIII, 512MB SDRAM, integrated Intel 810 graphic with 4MB own videoram). It works only in Windows, delaying the PC start by like 2-3min and refusing to boot from it.
So, SSD is not w/o a own set problems, and we did not need to get back to the reliability. The new SSD seems to be even less reliable (smaller size = less duration = useless to buy a expensive drive that die so soon…).
One of my friend who operates a datacentre
dare not even use SSD as they’re unreliable.
This is very poor for a technical article. While the premise that spinning hard drives give more capacity for your money is sound, the article is otherwise full of innacuracies and misunderstandings. For example, the comparison based on serial transfer rate is totally misguided. One of the biggest benefits of SSDs is their random access performance which completely decimates spinning disks and is why SSDs are just as appropriate for a desktop machine as a boot drive because the OS primarily does (a lot of) random reads and writes.
And starting the article with an anecdote about the author’s personal experience with a single SSD as evidence of a general problem. There are huge differences in quality between the brands and I can guess which brand they had since there’s one I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Clearly the author or burned by a bad SSD and that’s a good reason to steer clear of the cheaper brands unless you have a good backup solution…