Western Digital Raptor Preview: 10,000RPM & Serial ATA

General Usage Performance

Although not as performance-critical as content creation applications, it is the set of every day applications like Office and other general usage programs that the majority of users find themselves interacting with the most and also happen to be very disk intensive, after all, here's where most users find themselves complaining about I/O performance.

We start with VeriTest's Business Winstone 2002:

The Business Winstone tests are "market-centered" tests. Business applications are the popular applications employed by most users every day.

Five Microsoft Office 2002 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word)
Microsoft Project 2000
Lotus Notes
WinZip 8.0
Norton AntiVirus
Netscape Communicator

We start out by isolating all of the disk accesses that take place during a run of the benchmark and running them on each of the individual drives:

Business Winstone 2002 Disk Performance Performance in I/O Operations per Second (Higher is better) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) 658 581 538 472 448 444 400 332 | 0 | 132 | 263 | 395 | 526 | 658 | 790

The Caviar rises to the top of the performance charts once again, severely outperforming the competition. It's worth noting that the Caviar ends up being almost twice as fast as the Raptor in this test, but once again these numbers are meaningless unless we can put them in a real-world context; for that, we turn to the actual Business Winstone 2002 benchmark results:

Business Winstone 2002 System Performance Performance in Winstones (Higher is better) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) 35.3 35.3 35.3 34.2 34.1 33.4 31.8 30.1 | 0 | 7 | 14 | 21 | 28 | 35 | 42

Even though there was a 22% performance spread between the top three contenders in the isolated I/O tests, that translates into no impact on overall system performance - the three drives make your system perform about the same on average. In fact, it's not until you hit the bottom three drives that we start to see any noticeable performance differences.

The focus of this review is of course the Raptor, and here we see that the Raptor's IDE brother (WD1200JB) manages to outperform it by an impressive 17% in Business Winstone 2002. To put this in perspective, the performance gain you would get from going with the WD1200JB over the Raptor is akin to upgrading an Athlon XP 1600+ to an Athlon XP 2400+. Once again, we don't see an impressive showing by the Raptor, potentially due to the beta nature of our sample, but also potentially because of its lack of optimizations for desktop applications.