Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB SATA Hard Drive

Sandra & Crysis Load Times

Sisoft; Sandra XII SP1:

With Sandra XII SP1 you can now easily compare the performance of the tested device with its speed and its (published) power (TDP)! Sandra XII SP1 also has SSE4 (Intel) and SSE4A (AMD) benchmark code-paths, which is great for those of you testing next-generation AMD Intel chips. Since we are testing hard drives today we will be using the physical disk benchmark.

First up is the WD1500, which was able to have a drive index score of 63.40MB/Sec with a random access time of 8ms.

The Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB hard drive was able to out perform the 150GB Raptor as it had a drive index of 95.33MB/Sec with a random access time of just 7ms.

Results: Sandra XII SP1 showed that WD VelociRaptor hard drive had a 50.4% faster drive index score and a 1ms quicker random access time!

Crysis v1.21:

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago. The full retail version of the game Crysis was used with patch 1.21 for benchmarking.

Results: Crysis has a built in timer that is used to calculate the amount of time it takes to load a level, which is perfect for testing the differences between these two hard drives. A difference was noted when we loaded the level eight times and took the average of the time it took to load the first level of the game at a point we saved. The decrease in load times was found to be 2%.