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Western Digital's VelociRaptor 10K RPM SATA Drive

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the spinning-really-fast dept.

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."

5 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Solid State, Fast Disks... all for wimps by MosesJones · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you want real performance and aren't afraid of having to do a complete rebuild on a regular basis then the best bet is to purely use a huge amount of RAM, not Flash or other solid state disks but real genuine RAM.

    Okay so its insanely expensive and a power cut and UPS failure means you lose everything.... but the SPEED is fantastic.

    I mean I'm running Vista Ultimate on a dual quad-core server with 500GB of standard RAM as a disk and I can boot in under a minute and use Outlook AND Word at the same time.

    --
    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
  2. Raptors? Run! by Nushio · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm sure I'm not the only one who is constantly reminded of XKCD when someone mentions Raptors...

    --
    Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
  3. Re:Laptop drive? by mcpkaaos · · Score: 5, Informative

    When you say 'based on 2.5" tech,' does that mean this IS a laptop drive? It is not a laptop drive. Here, take a gander.

    I assume the power requirements would be intense though According to TFA, the Velociraptor consumes the least power out of the drives compared (all WD, including a Raptor 150).

    And also being a WD drive, as far as reliability goes you'd probably be better off just keeping your important documents in RAM. I've had 1 drive out of over 20 fail on me in the last 6 years, all made by WD (including several Raptors, which run hot as hell but never seem to skip a beat). The one WD drive that did fail did so only after 3+ years of constant usage in a server.

    I guess I don't understand all the WD bashing. They do have warranties, you know, and I hear they even honor them.

    Besides, why are you relying on a single drive? If you have Important Documents you need redundancy + backups, not a "better" hard drive. You should check this out. It's saved my butt on more than one occasion.
    --
    It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
  4. Re:Compared to solid state? by SD-Arcadia · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, you can remove the 3.5" container (I believe running it like this voids your warranty) but it still won't fit in a laptop because apparently although 2.5" form factor, it is several mm too high for a laptop. Not that you should attempt to run a 10K drive inside a laptop in the first place, especially without that heatsink thingy. The performance seems to be equal or better than SSD's. source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914.html

    --
    https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
  5. Re:ARGH! Stupid WD! by WhoBeDaPlaya · · Score: 5, Funny

    Exactly. It would only be flamebait if you posted something like :
    Mac: Hey PC, what are you doing?
    PC: Playing a video game.
    Mac: Which one?
    PC: All of them.