Western Digital unearths VelociRaptor

[HEXUS]

Western Digital today announced the birth of its VelociRaptor hard drives and claims a 35 per cent performance increase over its predecessor, the Raptor.

Read more.

[this_is_gav]

Smaller, quicker and double the capacity? :|

Wonder if these are too hot for a laptop.

[0iD]

300GiB is a decent size for a change, but in this day & age where fast 1TiB drives such as the F1 are becoming mainstream, is it enought for anyone but the hardcore gamer & enthusiast? But then again, that's always been the raptor marketpoint prettymuch.
And if I'm honest, however much I may want one, does it make any noticable difference when working or gaming...

[this_is_gav]

And if I'm honest, however much I may want one, does it make any noticable difference when working or gaming...

A hell of a lot when working with videos. General usage (gaming included) not so much - certainly not enough to warrant the price. Will wait and see how good this one is - it won't be anything like the 35% increase they're claiming though.

[Sandman]

I have 2 x 160 Gb Raptors in RAID0 in my main PC...they fly, but are quite noisy when working flat out. Levels in CoD4 load at an unbelievable speed

[TheAnimus]

but at this price, SSDs are looking a tempting option.

SSDs will take you to the bottleneck of your raid controller whislt been silent, drawing less juice, and far faster in seek times.

If your doing video editing, i guess the limitation of space on the SSDs would be an issue, but if your doing that, then surely proper enterprise SCSI drives are the best bet, better performance, better capacity, and much better realiability.

[arthurleung]

Most mainstream laptops are designed for 5400rpm only and 7200rpm already cut it quite close to max operating temperature, 10000rpm I guess we can see it killing itself or burn someone's hand in long term.

The VelociRaptor is suprisingly cheap when there is actually another drive in the same league: Seagate Savvio 10K.2

I reckon you'll see more people use these VelociRaptor in datacenter rather than in gaming platform. 3TB in an 1U case AND 10000rpm drive!

If you really want absolute performance you can always go for Savvio 15K, if you can find a laptop with SAS connector

[rufeo]

I waited over a year for this.... But got a raptor last month because I couldn't wait any longer. I wonder what the actual performance will be like? Will there be a noticeable difference between this and the 150gb raptor?

That extra space will be handy though, a few games and some video editing and most of the space on my raptor is gone.

Wonder how hot and noisy it'll run?....

[DeSean]

/Want want want

Look at the reviews at places like Techreport. It's amazing, not quite P4->C2D or Geforce7 to GF8, but it wins almost every benchmark. The only ones it loses on it still beats the other Raptors.

Sure, there will be better performing SSDs, but only for 10x the price at this stage and with poor warranties in some cases. And quite frankly, in a system with a modern CPU and graphics card, the power draw and noise difference will be negligible. (this drive is quieter and less power hungry than previous Raptors though!).

Now the question is do I want it for my OS or my games/programs?

[HSK]

i want either something like this, or SSD in my next build.

[TheAnimus]

/Want want want

Look at the reviews at places like Techreport. It's amazing, not quite P4->C2D or Geforce7 to GF8, but it wins almost every benchmark. The only ones it loses on it still beats the other Raptors.

Sure, there will be better performing SSDs, but only for 10x the price at this stage and with poor warranties in some cases. And quite frankly, in a system with a modern CPU and graphics card, the power draw and noise difference will be negligible. (this drive is quieter and less power hungry than previous Raptors though!).

Now the question is do I want it for my OS or my games/programs?

Its not really impressive at all, so these should be out in 2 months?

Now, even then as it stands if your able to make do with only 64gig of the 'fast stuff' you could get that for the same price. But in 6 months time. The performance difference is balistic, belive me i've got only one MTRON device, its ludicriously fast.

Now, raiding these SSDs gives almost perfect linear performance gain that will just trounce these drives into the ground (remeber the faster a drive, the more sound, heat, and less reliability). Think going from a PIII1ghz, to a quad core C2D, level of increase.

I'd save my pennies personally, or go for the small drive for OS + Games then the big drive for the archive stuff.

[MSIC]

Nice one to WD all round here - the engineers for trying something different, and the management for backing them and going with it.
I'm personally hoping that this marks the day when we all looked back and saw the beginning of the end of 3.5" drives.

[Steve]

WD's marketing department really got their hands on this one:

"SecurePark - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved."

If the heads on any hard drive are over the platters once it stops spinning above a certain rate, the Bernoulli effect is insufficient to keep the heads from coming into contact with the platter surface... and boom, you have a broken hard drive.

Now unless I'm missing some special feature... this has existed in hard drives for... ever.

[neonplanet40]

I want Wonder how much they will cost?

[NightshadowUK]

Yeah this is being added to my wish-list.

[AndrewJ]

OOOO I fancy one of those for replacing my ever more noisy WD 250GB.