New Raptors Coming....

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Hardware sites are buzzing today with news that Western Digital plans to announce a new version of its 10,000RPM Raptor Hard Drives in the new year. Two new flavors of Raptor are slated to be released one for server based use and the other for high-end game systems, each featuring a much improved capacity of 150GB. Rumored features of the WD1500AD (Server) and WD1500AH (Gamer) versions include:

SATA-II Capabilities w/ NCQ
16MB Cache
4.5ms Seek Time
1.2 million hours MTBF
All this storage and speed comes with a fairly hefty price tag. One vendor in Europe is listing the new server variant at just over $375 American. No official word from Western Digital yet, but the leaked reports claim that the drives will be announced very early on in 2006.

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Unfortunately, all the articles I can find are from French and German tech sites. Still, interesting news I think you'll agree. Comments anyone? :)

They could have pushed the spindle speed to 15000RPM :P

$375 is not too much compared to the 74G raptor now.

The Server and Gamer version will probably differ with TLER and NCQ more tweaked for low I/O (i.e. Gamers with lower max IOps but lower latency, aka low degree of optimization)

Hmmm. RAIDing a pair of these would be very nice, but how much bang does the extra £400 over a 7200rpm 300GB drive give you compared to what you could get in other parts of yer wee beastie?

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Originally Posted by arthurleung

$375 is not too much compared to the 74G raptor now

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Thats twice as much as a normal raptor and its also american pricing so not really.

I remember commenting about these when SATA2 came ut (all from my head back then) and they have now finally got them coming soon!

The model numbers of these things are indicating SATA1@150MB/s, if WD naming convention remains the same. Kind of hoping they are infact SATAII (or later) though, which is what everyone is saying. Can't see why WD would use sata1 anyway!

Nox

oh,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage...223083509.html

and

http://www.alternate.de/html/shop/pr...e&artno=A9BW18

Nox

i just got the 74gb one :( dammit lol

sweet,

i've got a 2x74gb setup, will get a 2x150gb setup :)

Surely if the Raptors are approaching the $350+ range they are going to have to directly compete with the latest SCSI hardware? If the price includes a 5 year guarantee (as with the original Raptor) then perhaps it is more reasonable, but I think many would still be loathed to spend £200+ on a sub 200GB drive! :undecided

=TcQi=

How much difference, real life difference will that make ? Im using the SATAII Hitachi T7K250 and it's just freaking fast :|