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OEM Hard Drive With Window
SJasperson writes "At last, you don't need to mess around with Dremel tools and Lexan (and destroy your valuable data) to get a clear window in your hard drive. Western Digital has released the Raptor X 150GB SATA hard drive. 10,000 RPM, 4.6ms seek time, 16MB buffer, and, yes, a clear window so you can see what's going on inside. Made out of a special polycarbonate lens with an ESD-dissipative coating, the lens is designed to let case modders and their groupies see the drive platters and heads without sacrificing data integrity."
The new Raptor - it's far faster than even several SCSI drives (in real world, "gamer" stuff), it's got more than 2X the storage than its predecessor, and it's coming at a price point of $300-350. (that's just $100 MSRP higher than the 74GB version).
New Egg has the drive for $295.
This performance comparison has the drive's gaming performance... It's as fast or faster than 15K SCSI drives! (single user, single app performance on this page, BUT - the article does have full benchmarks)
And that's just ONE drive. So, RAID 0 is probably pretty rockin.
And if you're already a Raptor user, it's my bet that this will lower the price of the other models. It's time to get my RAID 0 on!
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
If they're catering to the modders, then this is just not good enough unless it has blue LED's inside. Or any other colour. Selectable colours by jumper would be good. Or better yet, have the colour fluctuate when reading from the drive.
If I was in charge, I would make the colour smoothly change across the RGB spectrum, the colour depending on where on the HD the last read was. Red being the beginning of the hard drive, and blue being at the end. That way you could see with a glance from roughly where on the HD your data is being read from.
That would be way cool. Kudos to these guys for a good start.
Bork!