WD VelociRaptor

Western Digital's VelociRaptor drives succeed their previous Raptor offerings and are themselves (like the Raptors before them) SATA drives boasting a 10,000 RPM platter speed. The VelociRaptors feature a 1.4 million hour MTBF rating and a 5 year warranty. Initially served with a capacity of 300 GB and a 3.5 inch form factor targeted to high-end workstations (more below), Western Digital has also announced that the drives will be offered in a 2.5 inch form factor for use in blade and rack servers.

Performance of the drive is clocked at 120 MB/sec (buffer to disk sustained transfer rate) with a 3 Gb/sec SATA interface. A 16 MB cache is standard.

Features of the drive include the vendor's Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology, which seeks to optimize the performance of the drive (minimizing vibration-related performance drains) when specifically utilized in multidrive systems; "NoTouch ramp load technology," in which the recording head never touches the disk media; and, in the 3.5 inch flavor of the drive, a mounting frame with a built-in heat sink. This latter feature, called "IcePack," is an enclosure built around the drive itself (the drive is a 2.5 inch drive; but the IcePack mounting frame is designed for installation in standard 3.5 inch bays).

The vendor states that the 3.5 form of the drive is targeted to high-performance desktop implementations and is not backplane compatible; while the 2.5 inch form of the drive is targeted to "... blade servers and other enterprise storage configurations" and is not designed for use in laptops.

The 3.5 inch VelociRaptors are available now with a capacity of 300 GB and price tag of about $300; the 2.5 inch VelociRaptors are currently under OEM evaluation and are expected to be available commercially by the end of July. Initial 2.5 inch drive capacities are listed at 150 GB and 300 GB.

Contact Western Digital for further information.