Didn't impress me all that much. Almost all tests the WD Caviar 640 and the Samsung F1 640 were very close in terms of performance. I don't think I'd be buying this drive.
What a naive statement. :haha: I hope you DO realize that the high burst and average transfer rates of the WD6400AAKS and those 2nd-tier Samsung drives is an unrealistic measure of an HD's everyday usefulness and performance. These specs will only matter when you're copying things like an R9 9GB file. Alas, I think that happens rarely - not even 1% of the time you use an HD. If you have a bunch of tiny 500KB files, then high transfer rates won't do a thing. Access times will.
Acess times impact ALL aspects of an HD's use from bootup to game loading time, to transfers. There is NO 7200rpm that comes even close to the access times of a Raptor HD. So please don't bring up 7200rpm drives in a thread that's clearly about 10000rpm drives. If you can't afford one, sorry but that's no reason to bash it. Stick to your 2nd-tier Samsung drives then.
Now...for the rest of us logical people, here are some charts:
WD740ADFD
WD1500ADFD
WD3000GLFS
The 150GB Raptor was only a marginal improvement over the 74GB ADFD versions. Access times were the same.
However, the 300GB VelociRaptor is a whole different matter. Compared to the 150GB Raptor, there is a massive improvement of 1ms in the access times. We're now at 7.3ms only. The minimum transfer rate has increased by 35.9MB/s or 91%. The maximum transfer rate has increased by 33.4MB/s or 39%. The average transfer rate has increased by 26.6MB/s or 36%. The burst rate has increased by 31.1MB/s or 28%.
The VelociRaptor operates between 26 and 31 degrees in my case. My other three WD5000AAKS drives are all between 30 and 36 degrees.
Seeking is VERY quiet. If you have a few case fans on, then you won't even hear the VelociRaptor seeking. My old 150GB Raptor, on the hand, was quite loud.
