News - Western Digital preps fifth-generation VelociRaptor VR200M HDD

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Double the storage and a 15 per cent boost in performance could make Western Digital's latest Raptor a viable alternative to SSDs.

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Read more.

Could this also mean we see the existing drives hitting better prices on clearance?

I'm still running 2 36gb Raptors in my main rig and was considering getting an SSD, possible quandary coming up I think

$329?

so about £200?

you can get two 2TB drives and put them in RAID 0 for a bit more than that

I think these drives will have to be reasonably cheap to be attractive to consumers. Yeah they offer a much better price/GB than SSDs but I doubt they'd come close in performance. People in the market for a fast drive would probably just go for a lower capacity SSD and a standard HDD over one of these if they're even a bit expensive.

Not very fast for raptors...I've got 2 500GB samsung F3s in RAID 0 and its faster. These are my results with the F3s;

Single drive:
http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8582/f3normal.png


RAID 0:
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/3395/sfraidf32.png

western digital would be much better off investing it's performance segment resources in their silicon edge products. why are they still messing about with 10krpm sata drives?

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Originally Posted by semo

western digital would be much better off investing it's performance segment resources in their silicon edge products. why are they still messing about with 10krpm sata drives?

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The same reason why they're still messing around with 10k rpm sas drives. People need them.

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Originally Posted by Temi_D

Not very fast for raptors...I've got 2 500GB samsung F3s in RAID 0 and its faster. These are my results with the F3s;

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You don't buy raptors for sequential performance, they're not massive capacity warehouse storage disks, they're do-some-actual-work disks. Think OS, databases, and so forth.

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Originally Posted by aidanjt

The same reason why they're still messing around with 10k rpm sas drives. People need them.

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errr people need SSDs too, hence my statement. Also,

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the VR200M is designed to provide enterprise-class stability

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this thing belongs in the enterprise where you NEED a SAS interface. seagate (and hitachi maybe?) have the high end SAS market all wrapped up and raptors found themselves a nice niche between the consumer and enterprise segment but that segment is quickly being eroded by SSDs.... and has WD acquired a company that used to make high grade flash...

TBH if they're reasonably cheap, and I'm talking ~£50-70 (which I doubt) for the 150GB model I'd probably buy one because SSDs are still hugely expensive in terms of price/GB. Any more than that though and they're not really worth it for consumers IMO.

2 disks in raid 0 = 2x likely one is going to screw up.

I ran a 150GB Raptor 2 gens ago, now on a Samsung SSD. Yeah I notice the difference in the two. A quick 600GB Raptor is ideal for someone who wants a mix of speed and space, rather than two separate drives for speed then space.

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Originally Posted by semo

errr people need SSDs too, hence my statement. Also,
this thing belongs in the enterprise where you NEED a SAS interface. seagate (and hitachi maybe?) have the high end SAS market all wrapped up and raptors found themselves a nice niche between the consumer and enterprise segment but that segment is quickly being eroded by SSDs.... and has WD acquired a company that used to make high grade flash...

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Flash is still flash.

I'm surprised no-one is wondering how freakin' noisy they're going to be...

There is still a point to high-performance hard disks. You can write to hard disks an unlimited amount, and they will still work. This is not true of SSDs.

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Originally Posted by Fraz

There is still a point to high-performance hard disks. You can write to hard disks an unlimited amount, and they will still work. This is not true of SSDs.

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I'm sure the many, many people/businesses/anything planning on writing many GBs a day continuously for >10 years without upgrading will be delighted to hear that; unfortunately the chances of these HDDs having failed by then are fairly high.

:p