In today's shootout between Imation Pro 7000 solid state drives and Western Digital's VelociRaptor SATA disk drive (see "Product review: High price makes high-speed Imation SSDs a tough sell"), Mario Apicella finds that SSD is indeed the fastest storage that lots of money can buy. Given the whopping superiority of the Imation SSDs in read I/O and read transfer rates, their advantages for search-intensive applic In today’s shootout between Imation Pro 7000 solid state drives and Western Digital’s VelociRaptor SATA disk drive (see “Product review: High price makes high-speed Imation SSDs a tough sell”), Mario Apicella finds that SSD is indeed the fastest storage that lots of money can buy. Given the whopping superiority of the Imation SSDs in read I/O and read transfer rates, their advantages for search-intensive applications may help dull the pain of the price premium ($550 for a 16GB model, $1,700 for 64GB). But for write-heavier workloads, $300 for a 300GB VelociRaptor is a lot easier to swallow. See the results of Mario’s speed tests below. Iometer test results I/O operations per second (512 bytes) Test conditions Imation declared Imation Pro 7000 64GB Imation Pro 7000 16GB Western Digital VelociRaptor Sequential writes 45,000 45,400 45,226 23,165 Random writes 130 144 119 511 Sequential reads 81,000 77,899 79,916 19,926 Random reads 18,000 16,508 17,793 486 SiSoftware Sandra test results Transfer rate (MB/sec) Physical Disks test Imation Pro 7000 64GB Imation Pro 7000 16GB Western Digital VelociRaptor Reads 105 115 92 Writes 81 79 100 BootVis, Search, and Defrag test results Times in minutes and seconds … Original boot drive Imation Pro 7000 64GB Imation Pro 7000 16GB Western Digital VelociRaptor BootVis 82s 78s 78s 78s Search 7m 43s 57s 56s 2m 25s Defrag 50m 51s 3m 14s 3m 23s 3m 21s Analyze only 3s 1s 1s 2s Technology Industry