I had run a Seagate Cheetah before (and a Quantum Atlas before that), but I didn’t like having thick cables and extra expansion boards in my computer case. I had also run two 74 GB Raptor’s in RAID 0 (backed up to a NAS device, of course). Cables. Cable terminators. Expansion boards. More heat issues to worry about. In the end, it came down to reliability and speed, and I needed both… (and before you state SSD’s, I think I’ll pass until I see some long-term numbers).

The first thing I noticed about the VelociRaptor was that it was QUIET. Really quiet. As quiet as my WD Blue and Black Caviar’s. It runs cooler and appears to draw less power as well (and no, you can’t run it in a notebook).

How does it perform? I decided to find out.

I used the same test configuration as my previous WD Blue/Black test to maintain some consistency.

The numbers speak for themselves

Does the WD Caviar Black really live up to the hype? I hate to say this, but no. It actually performed slower than my older WD 640 GB AAKS with a single processor and 16 MB cache!

Don’t believe me? Take a look below!

Test configuration: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3 GHz, 4 GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2-800, Gigabyte P35-DS3L (F8b), Seasonic S12 600W power supply and of course, APC RS 1200VA regulated power. Operating system: Windows XP Professional w/ SP3. Both drives were imaged using Ghost 2003 and defragmented using PerfectDisk 2008 Professional. Software: HD Tune 2.55. Hard drive 1: WDC WD6400AAKS-00A7B and hard drive 2: WDC WD6401AALS-00L3B. AAM was confirmed as disabled on both drives using Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test.

Each benchmark was run four times. Time for the benchmarks:

As you can see, the Caviar Black 640 GB doesn’t perform all that better than the Caviar Blue (SE16) 640 GB.