Monday, April 5th 2010
New WD VelociRaptor HDD to Take HDD Closest to SSD
First surfaced earlier this year, Western Digital (WD) is just about ready with its newest line of VelociRaptor high-performance hard drives. The second generation of VelociRaptor will take a shot at much expensive solid state drives on two fronts: transfer speeds and access times, at highly competitive price-per-gigabyte. With transfer speeds, the new VelociRaptor drives offer sustained read speeds of 145 MB/s, while having access times of 3 ms, as close as it gets to flash storage. These are conventional (Winchester) hard drives with spindle-speeds of 10,000 rpm, double the areal density as its previous generation and having an onboard cache of 32 MB, with the standard SATA 6 Gb/s interface.
The actual drives come in thick 2.5" form-factor, with a 3.5" bay mounting frame that also serves as a heatsink since it has aluminum ridges. The drives have a noise-output of up to 37 dBA. WD rates its MTBF at 1.4 million hours, and backs it with a five-year company warranty. The drives come in capacities of 150 GB, 300 GB, 450 GB, and 600 GB with prices expected to be highly competitive with SSDs in terms of price-per-gigabyte, given its performance level.
Source:
TechConnect Magazine
The actual drives come in thick 2.5" form-factor, with a 3.5" bay mounting frame that also serves as a heatsink since it has aluminum ridges. The drives have a noise-output of up to 37 dBA. WD rates its MTBF at 1.4 million hours, and backs it with a five-year company warranty. The drives come in capacities of 150 GB, 300 GB, 450 GB, and 600 GB with prices expected to be highly competitive with SSDs in terms of price-per-gigabyte, given its performance level.
76 Comments on New WD VelociRaptor HDD to Take HDD Closest to SSD
Good rule of thumb is the water pipe analogy. Every time you add a connection (new SATA wire in this case, going from x4 to x8 on PCIe, etc.) you are adding more 2 way pipes. Going from SATA 2 to SATA 3 you are switching to larger pipes. RAID works by interconnecting the pipes at the receiving station. Each water source still has its own pipe, but overall water flow is increased because the pumping station is using multiple pipes as a water source. SSD's are like getting water from a pumping station instead of a river in the respect that the pumping station will have water already on hand and under pressure. While an HDD is like a river. It has more water and you can funnel it to get pressure, but not as quickly or as high a pressure level the pumping station.
Sorry, for the lesson. I have taught computer basics before and the water and car analogies get used a lot.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136544
Price of these are steep as well
techreport.com/articles.x/18712
See, Q4 and A4 here.
:)
www.alternate.de/html/themeworld.html?docId=671315&baseId=671316
www.anandtech.com/show/3636/western-digitals-new-velociraptor-vr200m-10k-rpm-at-450gb-and-600gb
www.legitreviews.com/article/1272/1/
hothardware.com/articles/WD-VelociRaptor-600GB-Fastest-HD-Ever
www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/966
www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd6000hlhx-velociraptor-600gb,2600.html