For people who want storage performance, solid state drives are the way to go. But with SSDs still costing around an arm and a leg plus a few strands of facial hair per Gigabyte, the good old hard drive is still the standard. But for people, nay, enthusiasts who want the best performance—which means going over the standard 7200rpm speeds on most hard drives today—without being stuck with the 128 to 256GB caps on SSDs, you shop for WD’s 10,000rpm VelociRaptor.
The VelociRaptor has been out for awhile now, although the previous generation’s capacity has been capped at 300GBs to give room for other features (such as heat management) on the 10,000rpm drive. WD has just announced a bigger, better drive that retains the 10,000rpm motor but comes with twice the capacity (topping out at 600GBs), a larger 32MB cache, and a SATA 6GB/s interface.
More than just doubled space, the new drive’s SATA 6GB/s interface and cache size contribute to a 15% improvement over the previous generation, which was already kicking the average hard drive to the curb on performance. The new drives also offer features for enterprise-class reliability—a must for an enthusiast hard drive that costs more than $300—and comes with its own IcePack mounting frame with a built-in heat sink to keep it cool.
The new VelociRaptor models are now available in 450GB for $299 and 600GB ($330) capacities in 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch form factors.
Tags: Desktops, Hard Drives, Storage, Western Digital
