Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLHX

With an 8GB IOzone write test, the Western Digital VelociRaptor came ahead of the two older HDDs as expected but was still coming up short of the Seagate 1TB SSHD and the two OCZ SSDs.

With the Threaded I/O Tester doing random writes, the VelociRaptor performance was at least now ahead of the Seagate SSHD but the hard drives were all eliminated by the performance of the solid-state drives.

Within Compile Bench, the Western Digital WD1500HLHX performance almost matched the Seagate 1TB SSHD and the OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, but the Vertex 3 obviously still was the supreme winner by far.

While the range of SSD/HDDs for this comparison were limited, the Western Digital VelociRaptor performance wasn't too impressive, at least for the Linux workloads we were using for stressing the Serial ATA 3.0 disk drive. Seeing as the Seagate ST1000DX001 1TB HDD retails for just a few dollars more than the WD WD1500HLHX VelociRaptor 150GB, I'd be much more inclined going with the Seagate SSHD for future purchases due to better Linux performance and larger capacity. I'll provide an update if after more real-world usage of the VelociRaptor I have different feelings, but in my usage of it this far the 10,000 RPM SATA3 drive isn't anything to get too excited about compared to the Seagate SSHD or SSDs.