WD Introduces Fastest Ever VelociRaptor HDDs
Not ready to go SSD? Then these could fill your need for speed.

Need some serious storage to deliver your data in a hurry but you can't afford to tap into solid state drives yet? Western Digital announced today that it is now shipping VelociRaptor 450GB and 600GB hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA family of hard drives.
The WD VelociRaptor hard drive packs 600 GB of capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor; but it is also available in the IcePack enclosure, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink.
The new drives run on a SATA 6 Gb/s interface and with a 32MB cache, which WD claims will give it a 15 percent performance boost over previous generation.
MSRP for the WD VelociRaptor 450 GB (model WD4500HLHX) is $299 USD and the 600 GB (model WD6000HLHX) is $329 USD.
Yes its backwards compatible
Hee, hee. Either:
1) You've been lucky and never had a disk crash.
2) You don't value your data much.
3) You take images of your disks daily so when a disk dies, you can get back up and running quickly.
RAID 0 is not for the average user. Those who use it usually learn the hard way. After that they swear off RAID 0 as a viable option.
Belief me, the Raptor is fast! You'll notice a difference moving from a 7200rpm to a 10K Raptor. The seek time makes all the difference. Also, did I mentioned that the Raptor is cool to touch? It generates significantly less heat compare to the 7200rpm drives. Oh and also 1.4 million hours MTBF.
After owning my first 300GB VelociRaptor (use as a OS/boot drive), I would not go back to any 7200rpm drives. The 7200rpm drives are only good for huge storage (mp4, avi, ogm, mkv, ts, etc...)
Although, I might consider moving to SSD later on when it becomes affordable.
Also, for certain types of workloads (software development for one), the old VelociRaptor beats all but the fastest PCIe-based SSDs due to SSDs having problems with small files I/O.
I'd really be interested in the smaller capacities - 150GB and 300GB - since I don't need such capacity for software development...
I agree completely with this statement.
Of course if you're not gaming nor running something else (like a fileserver) wich requires fast disk access a cheaper alternative will suffice. For me the only alternative is scsi and with that comparison the raptor isn't too expensive.
1 - faster, much faster
2 - Much quieter
I saw a lot of people saying they want smaller capacities etc. Well my main concern about raptor was the small capacity. Now the 600Gb is plenty but the pricing needs to be something like 25% lower i believe. I was thinking to use this drives for storage along with 2 ssd's for OS/swap/scratch but it will cost me more than 1000 to have 4 of those for stripping and mirroring!!
If WD drop the prices 25% in the next few months i will consider 4x600GB and a 300GB for my new workstation this august. But with the carrent prices i will choose 2xSSD's and 2x1TB caviar black or RE3.
And for those considering raid 0 as the worst option i will say i never hold my data in a raid 0 but simply use it as an OS drive and swap/scrach disks Or copy them for as long as i work with video editing or compositing. So if they fail i'll just have to buy a new one and copy again the files or re-install the OS.
Why not two 200 Gb blatter at smaller price. It would be exelent drive to randow read / write operations. Well maybe we get more information later.