From the genus dinosaurs. Testing the Western Digital Velociraptor WD6000HLHHX hard drive

Technical characteristics

Capacity: 600 GB * Spindle rotation speed: 10,000 rpm * Boofer volume: 32 MB * The average delay time: 3 ms * Number of parking operations: at least 600,000 * Interface: Sata Rev. 3 * Dimensions : 100×69.9×15 mm * Weight: 219 g * Price for July 2010: 9900 rub.

When buying a computer, it is somehow not customary to think about a hard drive. Of course, everyone wants more and cheaper hard drives, but they usually do not pay attention to the rest. But some low data exchange rate or too much search time can slow down a powerful gaming system. If the data with HDD will be too slowly or late to enter the RAM, then the processor will not receive the necessary information on time and will be idle.

You can increase the productivity of the file system in three ways: build a RAID massive, put an SSD or buy a quick hard drive. The first two options are of little interest: building a RAID system requires certain knowledge, and SSD is too expensive. So the easiest way is to buy fast HDD. There is only one company in the consumer market, which makes discs at the speed of spindle rotation above 7200 revolutions per minute – this Western Digital , producing the ruler Velociraptor.

Jurassic Park

For the first time, Western Digital presented fast hard drives in 2003 as part of the series Raptor. These discs were and remain the only HDD home with a spindle rotation speed of 10,000 rpm. All other companies still produce hard drives at a standard speed of 7200 rpm, because they do not want to compete with themselves in the corporate sector. For him, a series of HDDs has long been produced at a speed of 15,000 rpm, however, such discs with other interfaces work and are costly expensive.

After the release of the first Raptor, WD engineers did not stop and continued to work in the same direction. In 2003, at their disposal was the first SATA interface and only 1.5 Gb/s throughput. It was useless to increase speed – and the company actively worked on an increase in volume. So, the capacity of the drives of the second Raptor series increased from 37 to 74 GB. Then WD began to use a new type of bearings (this allowed to significantly reduce the noise level and increase the speed of work), and in 2006, in the framework of the same series, I released an HDD with a 16 MB cache and transferred discs to one plate. The third generation of the Raptor series was hard drives Raptor X , the volume of which reached 150 GB.

In 2008, WD began a new chapter in the history of hard drives: the fourth series appeared on sale, Velociraptor. WD has increased disk volume to 300 GB, added SATA 2 support, increasing the throughput twice. But the most noticeable was the change in the form factor-WD moved from 3.5 inch discs to 2.5-inch: due to the fact that the diameter of https://richy-farmer-gb-casino.co.uk/ the plate has become smaller, the reading/recording head began to move faster from the center of the disk to its edges.

According to the old tradition, the series updates had to wait two years. And now the fifth generation of Raptor got into the editorial office – Western Digital Velociraptor WD6000HLHHX.

From the cabinet to the matchbox

The father of the hard drive industry Alan Field Shugart spoke about magnetic drives: “Make them more, faster and cheaper”. The company created by Shugart Seagate in general, she made the founder's dreams into life, but this did not happen at once.

The first hard drive with a single array of magnetic heads, which simultaneously came into motion on request and began to look for the necessary data, was presented in 1956. It was called IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit , It was part of the IBM 350 RAMAC computer and could save up to 4.4 MB of data on fifty 24-inch plates. The drive was larger than the carrier: 152 cm in length and 172 cm in height, but at the same time only 74 cm in width (IBM demanded that all its devices take place in the standard seventy -fifty -saturate doorway). IBM 350 spent enormous by modern standards the amount of time to search for the necessary information is 600 milliseconds.

In 1961, the company introduced its drive Bryant Computer Products – Bryant 4000 would hardly fit in your pantry. The cabinet 1.3 meters high used 26 plates with a diameter of 99 centimeters each. Bryant Computer Products managed to noticeably break away from IBM: Bryant 4000 to 196 MB of data, access time was in the range from 50 to 205 ms.

Finally, in 1973, IBM officially introduced a relatively compact hard drive IBM 3340 , Almost immediately nicknamed Winchester. Why exactly the Winchester, you probably know: the device should have used two spindles for removable modules of 30 mb each. Inside the company, the developers called the “30-30” disc, and once the leading designer Ken HOCKENTER held an analogy with the screw .30-30 Winchester. It is curious that the nickname "Winchester" was assigned to the drives only in the countries of the former USSR – in the West they have not been said so long ago. The device itself eventually used the interchangeable modules of 35 and 70 MB, had access time at 25 ms and error correction algorithm. All existing hard drives now use technologies implemented in IBM 3340.

Compact internal hard drives began to be used in personal computers since the beginning of the 1980s, when IBM introduced the second generation of IBM PC-the PC/XT system. The “Machine” set included a 5.25-inch Seagate Winchester for 10 MB. Massive hard drives remained the industrial standard until 1987, when the world was presented to the world in the 3.5 -inch form factor. Further development of hard drives went noticeably faster – manufacturers admitted that 3.5 inches are suitable for the market in the best way, retain the effective ratio of the capacity and price per gigabyte.

Miniaturization continued with the presentation of 2.5-inch (then, unexpectedly, 1.3-inch) and 1.8-inch drives. The former are now actively used in mobile and some desktop computers (like our Velociraptor), the latter are more suitable for compact players and cell phones. The industry, meanwhile, does not stand still-the maximum volume of modern 3.5-inch hard drives are going to double the next year up to 4 TB. But it all started with a cabinet with a capacity of a couple of megabytes ..

Fast hunter

Outwardly Velociraptor has not changed. Before us is the same 2.5-inch drive. In order for it to be inserted into a regular computer, WD supplies an adapter to a 3.5-inch slot (there is no adapter in the Russian configuration).

The maximum volume of the new Velociraptor doubled to 600 GB – for high -speed hard drives it is very, very much. Further – the clipboard increased from 16 to 32 MB. Finally, WD has connected the latest SATA Rev interface. 3 with a bandwidth of 6 GBT/s. We have already worked with this interface and we can say that the standard hard drives cannot master it, so it will be interesting to see what Velociraptor is capable of 10,000 rpm.

Unwound

For test tests, we took the motherboard already familiar to you ASUS P7H57D-V EVO , Equipped as USB 3.0, so Sata Rev. 3. Put the processor Corei7-860 , Equipped it with cooling Cooler Master Hyper N620 , added a couple of rangers Kingston Hyperx DDR3-1666 and fed from 850 W OCZ. To control the system, they installed Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. She worked with graphics XFXGEFORCE GTX 285. For comparison with WD6000HLHX, we took the simplest hard drive Seagate With the speed of spindle rotation of 7200 rpm and cache 8 MB – before many home computers equipped with such disks. Also in our editorial office was Seagate Barracuda XT from 7200 rpm, 64 MB of buffer and SATA Rev interface. 3.

* * *

Western Digital's hard drive showed incredible results. The minimum speed of its operation was 154 MB/s, the maximum – 244 MB/s, and this is a record. When connecting via SATA Rev. 3 The Seagate Barracuda XT hard drive showed no more than 110 MB/s, and the usual Seagate Winchester, connected via SATA 2, did not spin 70 MB/s faster.

The higher the throughput, the easier it is to work with the system: with the simultaneous launch of several applications at once, there will be no offensive hangs, the speed of copying documents will increase, and indeed work with data. Is this convenience of 10,000 rubles – a controversial issue, but working with a computer will become much more pleasant.