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
I love that warm fuzzy feeling you get from platters... sorta like LPs (33 and a half vinyl records).
:)
Also, these drives (like the previous models) are used in between the "I need 10K/15K SAS" and "7200rpm SATA" situations. The drives to cable ratio is not always 1:1.
And then my X25-M.
Now I'm really holding myself from buying 2 more for different systems because right around Christmas Intel will drop their prices in half. That means 160GB for about $220. The Raptors better come up with some good pricing.
Im running 40 1tb drives in my nas, thats about for storage.
I am just glad to see I was right about this when this story cropped up a few weeks back.
Since these are sustained reads of 145 MB/s, then the burst reads should be in the low 200ish range, say 215 MB/s. That is rather impressive.
What about Write speeds. Any word on that projected figure?
I would like the 300gb model to replace my system drive...
Personally, I'd get an SSD for storage, but not for any of my primary drives.
The reason most gamers still use the Raptors is the fact that game data gets updated, save files change all the time, and games will be installed and removed. SSD have a limited write numbers and this would be hell on the drive.
SSD's will improve game loading time that is about it, the only reason gamers are sticking to VR is because they can't afford an SSD or because they need more space.
Example:
1 HDD + 1 SATA2 plug = 300 MB/s max theoretical
2 HDD + 2 SATA2 plug = 600 MB/s max theoretical
3 HDD + 3 SATA2 plug = 900 MB/s max theoretical
4 HDD + 4 SATA2 plug = 1200 MB/s max theoretical
etc. as each HDD will have their own SATA lane to themself
This HDD will never full saturate a SATA 2 lane, so have all the extra throughput from a SATA 3 setup is pointless cause it will never be used.