Western Digital's VelociRaptor Drive Packs Killer Speed

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

When it comes to hard drives, size and speed can make a real difference in performance and usability, and Western Digital thinks its new VelociRaptor hard drive is a winner in both areas. The new WD VelociRaptor is an enterprise-capable drive with twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance boost over Western Digital's existing family of Raptor hard drives.

According to Tom McDorman, VP and general manager of Western Digital's enterprise business unit, the VelociRaptor drive delivers better performance and reliability than all other SATA hard drives currently on the market. While the VelociRaptor is well suited for low-end servers and workstations on the business side, it also packs a performance punch designed for PC power users with a thirst for speed and storage performance.

Fast and Furious

The VelociRaptor is a 300GB hard drive that spins at 10,000 rpm, with a three Gb/s interface and a 16MB cache. In terms of reliability, Western Digital says the drive has a mean time between failures (MTBF) rating of 1.4 million hours. That, says Western Digital, is the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive.

Read entire story here (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20080421/bs_nf/59394).

[mountain_rage]

That seems a little pricey, I'm much more likely to just get 4 80gig h/d and raid-0 them to get even faster speeds for roughly the same price.

[carpefile]

Yeah, but just think of next year, when you can just buy four of these and sling'em raid0 for about the same price as one of'em now. :)
The best value for cost per GB are the 500GB drives right now (around $.20 per gig if you shop around). Course that may just be for my purposes, as I'm more an archiver than a gamer. :)

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

one way to stock up your node! ;)

[w31n3r]

this may make my Christmas list, hopefully it'll be affordable by then.

personally, i'd like to see a more proactive approach towards solid state technology (sorry for side tracking here). at $20/GB the prices aren't falling fast enough and it is the future. for those speed freaks, there are SSDs that give a sustained sequential read/write speed of about 120MB/s...thats over 60% better than the best conventional drives out there. when oh when will there be price parity...

[jcubed]

Right now, I don't care what it is, I just need as much storage as I can get.