Western Digital's VelociRaptor Hard Drive Hits 1 TB
The name VelociRaptor has been notorious for performance with hard drives (& dinosaurs, as well), and today Western Digital added another member to its ranks
Western Digital has been producing high performance hard drives since its original Raptor drive in 2003. The Raptor series is known for its performance and the spindle speed operating at 10,000 RPM. Today, WD moved forward with its first 1TB drive based on its newer VelociRaptor on a SATA 6 Gb/s interface, with a 64 MB buffer size. The WD VelociRaptor 2.5-inch hard drive comes in the IcePack enclosure that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps the drive extra cool when installed in a desktop or workstation system. The WD VelociRaptor will come in capacities of 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB, dropping the 300 GB and 600 GB versions from the product page. WD is leveraging the enterprise-class drive not only for the enterprise market but for high-performance PCs, Mac computers and professional workstations that require a balance of high performance and capacity.
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Features of the WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:
- Super speed - SATA 6 Gb/s interface and 64 MB cache optimize the 10,000 RPM WD VelociRaptor.
- Higher capacity - WD VelociRaptor SATA hard drives employ Advanced Format Technology to achieve capacities up to 1 TB.
- Rock-solid reliability - Designed and manufactured to workstation standards to deliver stellar reliability in high workload environments.
- Ultra-cool operation - Consumes less idle power and uses similar active power as the previous generation WD VelociRaptor while offering greater capacity and performance.
- Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) - Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
- NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection when in transit.
- Environmentally conscious - In addition to being RoHS-compliant, this generation of WD VelociRaptor is also a halogen-free design.
Early reviews of the WD VelociRaptor 1 TB has the drive performing around 215 MB/s read and 205 MB/s write for sequential speeds. These numbers show a nice improvement of WD VelociRaptor 600 MB and begin to hit closer to SATA II SSD speeds. Even with the performance of the 1 TB, the VelociRaptor still comes no where close to the access times of a SSD at 7.1 ms versus 0.1 ms of most SSD.
WD VelociRaptor hard drives are available now at select distributors, resellers and e-tailers, and come with a five-year limited warranty. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 1 TB (model #: WD1000DHTZ) is $319.99 dollars, the 500 GB version (model #: WD5000HHTZ) is $209.99 dollars and the 250 GB version (model #: WD2500HHTZ) is $159.99 dollars. More information about WD VelociRaptor hard drives can be found on the company website.



I'll be down-voted, but seriously, is it that hard to spell VelociRaptor?
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1907/1/
it's to supplement SSD, not a replacement...obviously...
wish I can get 2 of them to stripe them...
Last I checked, SSDs just hit $1/GB. The 1TB VelociRaptor is $0.32/GB. They're nowhere near the same price. Although I still think it's a tad too expensive. Somewhere around $0.28/GB would be the sweet spot for the 1TB drive.
Have you owned one? I can hear my two 30's, but my Hitachi 500 is noisy as hell.
But it is getting marginal product. I would very much like to see velocity raptor with ssd cache! It would be nice product! Not cheap, but fast and cheapet than pure ssd version.
They are fantastic drives.
I like SSDs, but many of the older models (and some of the newer ones) lose performance over time (though TRIM address this), and they are WAY too expensive.
Using an SSD and having 220 GB of USABLE drive space is just not a useful thing unless you are space constrained such as in a laptop. For desktops and workstations, striping 2 velocity raptors and getting 450 MB/s with 2 TBs of drive space is a much better solution... even with higher access times.
Call me when SSD's can last for 20+ years. Until then, I won't touch them. I don't want to be forced to buy a new SSD every 5 years because the flash decided to die on me.
I realize that quality costs money; but this is getting close (well, sort off) to SSD territory with the speed advantage obviously on the SSD side.
I would normally agree with such a sentiment, but how long do you really use a single hard drive? I generally end up upgrading simply due to performance.
Sure nearly all the drives no longer in my desktop are running other things now, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't have done it anyway.
7-9 years is about the most you will get out of the toughest HD's, even the industrial drives we get here at work for our big RAID/backups.
I'd take an SSD over these anyday.
Noiseless, rocket ship performance with great reliability. Just don't use over 65% of its space on a SSD to ensure max performance/life.
10000rpm drives still have their place in computing, though they may have become far less relevant for the gaming enthusiast over the past couple of years, in workstation environments involving production work mechanical drives are still king. Here both performance and capacity matter, and SSD's are still far too expensive given their incredibly high price per gig and relatively limited performance benefits when rendering/encoding. And yes, these are by far the most time consuming aspects of this work.
Anandtech did a very good review of the new velociraptor...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5729/western-digital-velociraptor-1tb-wd1000dhtz-review/1