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WD announces VelociRaptor hard drives

Published on 22nd April 2008 by Tim Smalley

The VelociRaptor takes a strange form, but it's 35 percent faster than previous generation Raptor drives.

Western Digital has announced the VelociRaptor, a drive that it claims to be the world’s fastest SATA hard drive. And if that’s not enough, the company says it has “a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation [Raptor drives].”

The drive takes form in a 2.5-inch housing with two 150GB platters spinning at 10,000 RPM packing a total of 300GB of storage. What’s more Western Digital says the drive is built with “enterprise-class mechanics”—just like the previous generation Raptor hard drives that held the performance crown for so long.

Despite its form factor, this drive is not designed for notebooks and comes enclosed in a Western Digital IcePack – a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heatsink, enabling the drive to fit in standard 3.5-inch hard drive mounting bays. However it also seems that some reviews mention that removing this heatsink voids also the warranty!

"Demand for ever-higher PC performance continues to increase and WD is the leader in this category with the WD Raptor. We created WD VelociRaptor hard drives to lead PC enthusiasts into the next era of PC and Mac storage performance and satisfy their insatiable thirst for computing speed," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise business unit. "The new WD VelociRaptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market."

The VelociRaptor builds on the foundations laid by the original Raptor drives and feature a 16MB cache. What’s more, they’re the first Raptors to support the SATA 3Gb/sec interface, which should provide some advances in performance.

Western Digital has also added support for Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward and SecurePark. The first is a technology that WD claims “optimises performance when the drives are used in a vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis,” while the latter ensures that the recording heads are parked off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. The company says that “this ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.”

The WD VelociRaptor will first be available in Alienware’s high-performance ALX gaming desktop machines at the end of April and will then be available for DIY customers to buy separately by mid-May at a suggested retail price of $299.99 USD, according to a statement released by the hard drive maker.

WD’s claims are pretty lofty, but based on some of the reviews that we’ve already seen, the drive appears to live up to expectations. Will you be looking to purchase one of these drives when they become available? Let us know in the forums.

38 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

samkiller42 22nd April 2008, 10:53

Want for Raid 1 config. Hopefully the UK market wont get hit hard with the prices.

Sam

Edit. Scan UK have these listed on their site here. Uk Price is £252.61

Arkanrais 22nd April 2008, 11:09

interesting, though I don't even have enough money for an old 150GB raptor.
I remember seeing SCSI drives that went 15000RPM and up to 300GB at said speed. perhaps they could be a better buy for the speedfreaks(in addition to a suitable raid card for SCSI connector{s})

Baz 22nd April 2008, 11:26

$300 = £252 :(

still, 300gb of super fast storage is very tempting, even at that price premium.

[USRF]Obiwan 22nd April 2008, 11:45

I can have a 2 terabyte for that amount of money.

Bindibadgi 22nd April 2008, 11:45

But it's a genuine performance difference and unfortunately you can't overclock slower hard drives :(

It's enterprise level for consumers.

FooSai 22nd April 2008, 11:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baz
still, 300gb of super fast storage is very tempting, even at that price premium.

Seriously? the price premium is 6x... I'd much rather have a 1.5TB raid10 array than one of those, it'd be about the same price.

But then they aren't exactly meant to be good bang for buck now are they

Nexxo 22nd April 2008, 12:02

The price will come down soon enough. What we have in the mean time is smaller, lighter, faster, quieter, cooler, more power efficient. Win all around. ;)

Boswell 22nd April 2008, 12:04

lol wtf is Scan doing with those prices...I will pay the shipping and buy from the US thanks :)

neonplanet40 22nd April 2008, 12:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boswell
lol wtf is Scan doing with those prices...I will pay the shipping and buy from the US thanks :)

Yea and get hit with tax, vat and import duty. So you would end up paying about £350 anyway.

Mister_Tad 22nd April 2008, 13:01

I'll be picking one up next time I'm in the states - I suspect the UK price will take a nose dive as soon as these are actually available, but would be surprised even then to see it less than £200

Would be nice to see 150GB and 74GB models on the way, home users don't need 300Gb of fast storage.

Redbeaver 22nd April 2008, 13:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mister_Tad

Would be nice to see 150GB and 74GB models on the way, home users don't need 300Gb of fast storage.

ditto.

Faulk_Wulf 22nd April 2008, 14:45

Well if you have every high-end game then that's getting to be almost 8-10gb a game.

(Also $1 a GB doesn't sound bad to me. Especially for Raptor speed?)

Mister_Tad 22nd April 2008, 14:49

A raptor doesn't do much (if anything) for games - just OS and apps

In a typical config you would have a raptor as an OS & app drive and a fast 7200rpm drive for games and storage

1ad7 22nd April 2008, 15:43

I do the oposite, fast 7200rpm for windiows apps and storage and all games and other performance stuff on 150gb raptor. I do notice a difference not in fps but in load times, about twice as fast load in bf2.

Hg 22nd April 2008, 15:46

i went for 2x500GB HDDS in Raid 0
these infact http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/114085/samsung-spinpoint-t166-hd501lj.html
super fast and happy with them, too little too late for the raptors as most people i know are looking at raid 0 if they need perfromace.
Also as the HDDS increase in size platter density increases so times seek/read times decrease so the cap between normal HDDs and raptors will fall

Redbeaver 22nd April 2008, 16:08

i'd love to put 2x150 in RAID-0. but 2x300? that's... overkill for my taste. i'll b tempted to put too many stuff on it, and when the whole thing fails... poof. smaller the better for me. not so much for money i suppose. 1Gb/$ is darn good for the performance.

Firehed 22nd April 2008, 16:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
But it's a genuine performance difference and unfortunately you can't overclock slower hard drives :(

It's enterprise level for consumers.

True, but the gains you see in daily use are next to nothing. Unless you actually have enterprise-level needs (RAW HD video footage or photoshopping insanely huge files), the bottleneck still tends to be the computer pondering about what it should do with the data for a while.

Redbeaver 22nd April 2008, 16:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Firehed
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
But it's a genuine performance difference and unfortunately you can't overclock slower hard drives :(

It's enterprise level for consumers.

True, but the gains you see in daily use are next to nothing. Unless you actually have enterprise-level needs (RAW HD video footage or photoshopping insanely huge files), the bottleneck still tends to be the computer pondering about what it should do with the data for a while.

i have to disagree.

on paper (im not 100% sure), the data output rate of any component in your computer is significantly higher than your harddrive. therefore, increasing a significant boost to ur HD rate (if ur coming from a barracuda 7200.9 to this velociraptor)(i love that name btw), will boost ur overall performance by a significant value as well.

on practice, coming from 80gb 7200.9 to 2x80Gb RAID-0 feels a heck lot more than 'next to nothing'. <disclaimer: results may vary :P>

Primoz 22nd April 2008, 16:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redbeaver
ditto.

Ditto as well.

EDIT:

Quote:

The VelociRaptor needs only two platters to reach its 300GB capacity. Western Digital says it's also working on a single-platter version of the drive, but that's not ready yet.

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583/2 <- in between the two pics. Now we just need a single platter 74 gig model that's limited to the outer half of the surface and the speed graph will fall down even less :D

Mister_Tad 22nd April 2008, 17:14

A short stroked 74GB version just isn't going to happen, would be no cheaper to manufacture than the 150GB model

any 74GB drive released would just be a single sided single platter drive

Anakha 22nd April 2008, 17:36

I still miss the 18GB 15kRPM Ultra160 HDD I used to run my old system off. It was insanely fast, and did everything I needed, and while I was only running Win2k on it, it (And the Dual-PIII motherboard) would still wipe the floor with most contenders at LAN parties. At least until the Athlon XPs they were running hit 2.9Ghz.

TomH 22nd April 2008, 17:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arkanrais
I remember seeing SCSI drives that went 15000RPM and up to 300GB at said speed. perhaps they could be a better buy for the speedfreaks(in addition to a suitable raid card for SCSI connector{s})

Yeah. SAS cards don't come cheap (though they're not much more than your average hardware SATA RAID card) but on top of that, those disks you speak of are about £330 + VAT each.

And 8 in a server sounds something akin to an FTL drive spinning-up. Not really ideal - these new Raptors are a good comprimise.

Mister_Tad 22nd April 2008, 17:40

SAS/SCSI disks are tweaked for high IOPS which, while its great for servers, doesn't do anything for desktop use.
Most current gen 7200 rpm drives are as fast or faster for desktop use than the latest and greatest 15k drives

LeMaltor 22nd April 2008, 18:46

In one of the reviews -> "Drives were run with the PCB facing up."

Is this how HDD's are supposed to be run, I have always put them in with the PCB facing down?

notatoad 22nd April 2008, 19:13

it doesn't matter what direction your hard drives face. should run the same whether they are pcb down, up or sideways.

rupbert 22nd April 2008, 19:20

Getting one of these on day of release, I love my 74Gb Raptor and this looks to be a serious upgrade.

r4tch3t 23rd April 2008, 05:09

I wonder if they are the standard laptop size, there are debates on the net, some say yes but others say no. I am on a 5400rpm drive and the load times in games are killing.

Woodstock 23rd April 2008, 06:05

from what ive read they are to high for laptop's, but if it could the battery life would be a killer

metarinka 23rd April 2008, 07:15

hrmm I might have to include one in my next system. I had 2x 37gig raptors when they first came out in raid 0, sold them and bought my current 75gig raptor and maybe in the future I'll buy the 300 gig one. They make really good Os/gaming and application drives (and yah I have a tempory file I put photoshop and video editing files in.

the speed is noticable, basically on reducing load times. but you have to decide if saving 10 seconds on game loads and maybe 15 or so on windows is worth it to you.

Journeyer 23rd April 2008, 09:36

Sweet!

I've been waiting for WD to come up with something faster than the old Raptors. I will be getting a couple of these to replace my current Raptor RAID.

[USRF]Obiwan 23rd April 2008, 09:48

There is a review out on anandtech. And still i think the Samsung spinpoint is the best bang for the buckazoids

Paradigm Shifter 23rd April 2008, 10:31

If these hit sub £180, then I'll be tempted. Even so, I still think that the Samsung F1 drives are probably the best bet with respect to price/speed/capacity.

Bauul 23rd April 2008, 10:35

I'm a firm beliver in getting the best out of your harddrives, they are a totally underated part of a PC's set up in my opinion. Yeah true you have a 9800GTX but that's not going to speed up Windows loading, any apps loading, your games loading, joining a game online and not being the last one in, moving data around on your harddrive etc. etc. SCSI drives are great for servers where you need to load data from different parts of the drive simultaniously, but for a single user nothing beats a Raptor. Hopefully the older generation of Raptors will come down in price now so I think I'll pick up a replacement for my aging first generation Raptor. Along with all the other things I need to replace in my aging PC *sigh*

Edit: Just read the Storage Review review, bugger me that's a fast drive.

completemadness 23rd April 2008, 15:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Woodstock
from what ive read they are to high for laptop's, but if it could the battery life would be a killer

i would have thought they have stuck that massive heatsink on for a reason, i think the heat could also be a killer :p

Mister_Tad 23rd April 2008, 15:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by completemadness
i would have thought they have stuck that massive heatsink on for a reason, i think the heat could also be a killer :p

They stuck the heatsink on for ease of mounting in a 3.5" bay. The only issue running one of these in a laptop would be the height.

wuyanxu 23rd April 2008, 15:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bauul
I'm a firm beliver in getting the best out of your harddrives, they are a totally underated part of a PC's set up in my opinion. Yeah true you have a 9800GTX but that's not going to speed up Windows loading, any apps loading, your games loading, joining a game online and not being the last one in, moving data around on your harddrive etc. etc. SCSI drives are great for servers where you need to load data from different parts of the drive simultaniously, but for a single user nothing beats a Raptor. Hopefully the older generation of Raptors will come down in price now so I think I'll pick up a replacement for my aging first generation Raptor. Along with all the other things I need to replace in my aging PC *sigh*

Edit: Just read the Storage Review review, bugger me that's a fast drive.

agree that hard drives are the most limiting thing in most people's PC's. i mean, i've got a quad core yet i cannot do 4 things at once, because hard disk isn't fast enough. when im burning DVD, game loading slows down to nearly stops, when i copy files, games loading also slows down.

but Raptors are never good value for money, Sammy F1 and WD 640GB looks to perform on par in almost everything apart from seek time.

HourBeforeDawn 23rd April 2008, 20:13

hmm I think I may get 2 of these a shot, ehh if I dont like them well back to the store they will go

Hamish 24th April 2008, 00:29

argh, if they released a 150gig one for like £150 or so i'd have 2 in a second
but i really dont need that much storage for a system disk and its just too much :(