10,000 RPM SATA VelociRaptor

[+Fates]

Western Digital Starts Shipping 'VelociRaptor' Hard Drive For PC, Mac

 

The 10,000 RPM SATA model is expected to be available in Alienware's ALX game desktop by the end of the month.

 

By Antone Gonsalves

InformationWeek

April 22, 2008 06:00 AM

 

Western Digital on Monday started shipping the VelociRaptor, the company's fastest hard drive for PCs, Macs and professional workstations.

 

The latest version of the 10,000 RPM SATA drive holds up to 300 GB of data, which is twice the storage of previous versions, in a 2.5-inch form factor. The drive is enclosed in a 3.5-inch mounting frame that fits into a standard system bay. The frame has a built-in heat sink for keeping the drive cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.

 

http://www.informationweek.com/news/storag...cleID=207401107

[Gunrunner]

Unfortunately the latest 7200rpm drives from Seagate, Western Digital and Samsung are less expensive, offer more space, consume less, heat up less and make way less noise.

Except in some very precise uses, they also offer better performances (even though the new 300GB version should partially close the performance gap).

 

So, unless you know what you are doing and that you will benefit from it, the Raptor series are just shiny, noisy, hungry gadgets bringing no real benefit besides bragging rights.

 

BTW, I owned pairs of 74GB and 150GB Raptors, at first supposedly to improve system performances and due to the disappointing comparison with any modern 7200rpm drive in real use situation, used them to house databases, where they really shined as a low cost alternative to SCSI drives.