Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB WD3000GLFS Review – Evolution

Testing Methodology and System Setup

Testing Methods

Since it had been a good while since our last test of storage drives had occurred, I took this time to update the testing setup just a bit.  I have migrated from Windows XP to Windows Vista x64 with the SP1 service pack installed.  We are still using a P35 motherboard with the ICH9 south bridge (still used on X48 motherboards and unchanged) but upgraded to 2GB of memory in alleviate any issues with Vista as the new operating system of choice.  We are still using a Core 2 Duo E6400 dual-core processor that is more than capable of pushing our storage options to the limits.  Other components are listed in the table below.

Our tests are a good mix of synthetic and real-world benchmarks.  The two PCMark suites offer a good combination of both worlds while the IOMeter, HDTach, HDTune, Yapt and our custom File Copy test round out the selection to cover just about all bases.  If you have any questions about our tests just drop into the Storage Forum and we’ll help you out!

Test System Setup