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Western Digital's VelociRaptor 10K RPM SATA Drive
MojoKid was one of a number of people to submit about WDs new 10k RPM SATA Drive. He says "Western Digital's Raptor line of Hard Drives has been very popular with
performance enthusiasts, as a desktop drive with enterprise-class performance.
Today WD has launched a new line of
high-performance desktop drives dubbed the VelociRaptor, and the product
finally scales in capacity as well. The new SATA-based VelociRaptor weighs in at
300GB with the same 10K RPM spindle speed, but with one other major
difference — it's based on 2.5" technology. Its smaller two-platter, four-head
design affords the VelociRaptor random access and data transfer rates
significantly faster than competing desktop SATA offerings. Areal density per
platter has increased significantly as well, which contributes to
solid performance gains versus the legacy WD Raptor series."
The 2.5" form factor seems to have been standard in the server world for some time now. I could be wrong, but I think this is driven by the need to cram more and more computing power into finite rack space. And once the drive makers tooled up to make 2.5" drives for servers, it was bound to drive down the cost of 2.5" desktop drives.
But here's the sad thing: most of this technology is both produced and consumed in countries that have long since gone to the metric system. But because the U.S. sets the standards, everybody uses English Traditional units for linear measure. Which helps to advertise our arrogance and backwardness. Not as bad as starting pointless wars, but it doesn't help!
I've seen a lot of WD drives die, and I wouldn't trust it anyways.
If I'm going to build a new rig, I still won't use WD drives, no matter how fast they are. They're still offering subpar warranty AFAIK.