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Western Digital Launches VelociRaptor 300GB - The World's Fastest SATA Hard Drive

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WD announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA "Raptor" series of drives. Designed with an enterprise-class foundation, the new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is modified specifically for PC and Mac enthusiasts and professional workstations. Destined to become the new high-performance favorite of these groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes packed with twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation.




From the bloodlines of the WD Raptor, the most popular hard drive for high-performance enthusiasts who demand the ultimate SATA drive, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drive is enclosed in the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink -- a customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.

"Demand for ever-higher PC performance continues to increase and WD is the leader in this category with the WD Raptor. We created WD VelociRaptor hard drives to lead PC enthusiasts into the next era of PC and Mac storage performance and satisfy their insatiable thirst for computing speed," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise business unit. "The new WD VelociRaptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market."

WD VelociRaptor is the next step up for the speed-craving PC enthusiast, and as with all WD drives, attention to detail in features, performance and reliability is a top priority. Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:
  • Killer Speed - Built on the performance of the WD Raptor, these 10,000 RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-bending performance.
  • Rock-solid Reliability - WD VelociRaptor drives are designed and manufactured to business-critical, enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. The design results in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF.
  • IcePack Mounting Frame - The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis.
  • Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) - Optimizes performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
  • SecurePark - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

Price and Availability
WD VelociRaptor (model WD3000GLFS) hard drives will be available on Alienware's high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. At launch, Alienware will offer maximum performance with two 300 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 configuration on http://www.alienware.com. WD VelociRaptor hard drives will be shipping exclusively through Alienware this month and will be available through the company's online store and at select distributors and resellers mid-May. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 300GB is $299.99 USD. More information about WD VelociRaptor hard drives may be found on the company's Web site here.

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Nice so its about 1$ / 1Gb of space.
 
Does this mean it will be 35% Faster And 35% Louder then it orginally was?

Should be interesting to see a review on this to see how it compares against standard based sata drives. It should also determine whether its worth paying the extra $$ per gb for a slight increase in read and write times.

Only time will Tell Thanks For the announcement :D
 
stop with the SATA drives and get to work on the SSD already!
 
don't think any reviews show decibels but they definitely show speed and temp. Thanks malware :)

- Christine
 
It appears to be pretty damn fast indeed. Although i don't think i could ever justify buying one without having a huge hole burning through my pockets. I just saw a 750gb at ncix for $99.
 
stop with the SATA drives and get to work on the SSD already!

sata is just interface...they have ssd with sata interface...

this thing looks nice but i think the future of hdd is solid state imo
 
it would be cheaper/faster to get 2 320GB seagates and doing raid0
 
Are these only SATA 1, because there are faster SATA 2 HDD out there? Seagate has a 15,000RPM SATA2 HDD
 
Very impressive speeds.. I can't see myself buying one anytime soon, but for some gamers who have the $$$ this could be pretty sweet!;)
 
The price is very nice compared to the other Raptors. I remember when we were paying $10/GB. It is nice that there is actually a little competition to the Raptors now, forcing WD to lower the prices a little bit. Now that there are 7200 RPM drives that are pretty much just as fast for a fraction of the price, WD needs to keep the prices reasonable on the Raptors now.

Are these only SATA 1, because there are faster SATA 2 HDD out there? Seagate has a 15,000RPM SATA2 HDD

All the Raptors before were SATA 1.5Gb/s, this is the first SATA 3.0Gb/s. I've never heard of a 15,000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s drive, can you show it to me?
 
cheap fast hd's in raid bruised teh raptor in the past and i guess the same thing is going to happen now.
 
it would be cheaper/faster to get 2 320GB seagates and doing raid0

It sure would.

And that would be 4 320GB drives, not 2.
 
Are these only SATA 1, because there are faster SATA 2 HDD out there? Seagate has a 15,000RPM SATA2 HDD

these are sata 2. Sata specs and RPM are not related.

Seagates cheetahs have always been 15K even on IDE... but they just dont seem popular. i dont know why that is.

While its not a bad idea to release a new raptor, SSD drives are what get us excited these days.
 
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Are these only SATA 1, because there are faster SATA 2 HDD out there? Seagate has a 15,000RPM SATA2 HDD

Sata1 & sata2 are just the speed of the interface... this dosent affect the performance of the drive on its own. Theres no disk drive out there that can use the bandwidth of 1.5gbps / 3.0gbps interface on its own...

As far as im aware, the only benefit of using Sata 2 is if you are raiding multiple drives and collectively the drives can utilise that amount of bandwidth... but for a single drive or 2 in raid 0, Sata 1 is fine (1.5gbps)
 
Sata1 & sata2 are just the speed of the interface... this dosent affect the performance of the drive on its own. Theres no disk drive out there that can use the bandwidth of 1.5gbps / 3.0gbps interface on its own...

As far as im aware, the only benefit of using Sata 2 is if you are raiding multiple drives and collectively the drives can utilise that amount of bandwidth... but for a single drive or 2 in raid 0, Sata 1 is fine (1.5gbps)

to add more to this, SATA 1 is 150MB/s and sata II is 300MB/s
Even the fastest terabyte drives these days cant keep going at 100MB/s consistently, so even these velociraptors wont break sata-1's specs - SATA-II only really has other features going for it at the moment, not speed.
 
Whoa............. Speechless.
 
Whoa............. Speechless.

Why? The 256GB SSD beats this thing so far into the ground, that you can't hear it's load, thunderous roar anymore.
 
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