Which Hard Drive is Fastest?

What Is The Fastest Hard Drive For a Home Computer?

Solid-state drives are generating a lot of buzz, but the good old-fashioned magnetic platter hard drive is still what most people have in their desktop and laptop computers. When most consumers ask, "What is the fastest hard drive?" they mean a traditional magnetic hard drive.

Surprisingly, given the highly technical blather surrounding hard drives, there is a pretty clear consensus on this question.

Professional reviewers, gaming enthusiasts, and other people in the know generally recommend the Western Digital Velociraptor family of hard drives as the "fastest" just about any way you care to measure speed. The Velociraptor stands alone in several categories.

• First, it is the only consumer hard drive whose platters spin at 10,000 rpm. Most others max out at 7200 rpm. Rotational speed is a big contributor to overall hard drive performance. The faster those platters are moving, the sooner the sector of a platter that's needed gets under the read-write head.
• Second, the Velociraptor's platters are 2.5 inches in diameter. That reduces the distance that the read-write head must travel to move from its home position to the track where it is needed, resulting in much faster seek times.
• Third, the Velociraptor has a generous 32 MB cache. Cache memory holds the most frequently used data and dishes it to the I/O bus at speeds up to 1000 times faster than an electromechanical read-write head.

Speed, Capacity and Price

In benchmark tests, the Velociraptor consistently beats other high performance hard drives on average seek time, sustained data transfer, time to access data, and most other metrics. It doesn't matter whether the files being read/written are long or short, sequential or random. The Velociraptor excels in all areas.

In sequential read/write transfer tests, the Velociraptor moves data at about 147 Mbps. Read and write seek times are under 4 ms, about half of most other hard drives. Average latency is only 3.0 ms.

The current generation of Velociraptor drives support SATA 3, a serial I/O standard that can transfer data at up to 6.0 Gbps, twice as fast as SATA 2. While that sounds impressive, no hard drive can match the 3.0 Gbps maximum speed of SATA 2 yet, so SATA 3's is pretty much overkill.

The capacities of the Velociraptor hard drives range from 150 to 600 GB, so depending on your needs, the speed advantage may be offset by the limited storage capacity. Street prices range from $79 to $250, depending on the storage size of the drive.

For completeness, I'll mention that there are some hard drives that run at 15000 RPM, such as the Seagate Cheetah 15K and Hitachi Ultrastar 15K lines. But these drives are designed for use in high-end servers, where the focus is on transaction processing and extreme reliability, so capacity per dollar tends to be higher.

If you're looking for the fastest hard drive for your high performance game machine, workstation, or small server, the Western Digital Velociraptor is your best bet.

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