HDTach results

Website: HD Tach 3.0


The 16MB of on-board cache delivers very impressive burst speeds, beating out all but the ultra-premium Intel X25 based drives and comfortably ahead of the the chasing pack of 1TB/1.5TB drives and various SSDs.


Average read speeds are the fastest we've ever seen from a mechanical hard drive, although are a long way behind those of the better SSDs, especially the dual drive controller based OCZ Apex and G.Skill TItan and Intel X25 drives. While this is undoubtedly still an impressive result for a mechanical drive, it's clear that SSDs are going to hold a sizeable advantage in the read speed stakes.


Average write speeds, while impressive for a mechanical drive are barely faster than Samsung's F1 1TB, a drive that costs less than half as much as the VelociRaptor and packs over three times the storage. The massive write speeds achieved by the dual drive controller equipped OCZ and G.Skill SSDs really don't have a lot to worry about here - they're a great deal faster, in these theoretical tests at least.


The VelociRaptor's claims of improved access times are well founded, with random access times of just 7.0ms. While the difference between the Raptor and chasing pack of 1TB drives doesn't seem like much, that 5ms difference becomes more apparent when the drive is working hard with large amounts of small files in circumstances like system boot and game load times. However, the SSDs are understandably far ahead with access times of less than 0.2ms thanks to their solid state design.