WD(R) Announces WD VelociRaptor(TM) - The World's Fastest SATA Hard Drive

PR Newswire ^ | April 21 , 2008 | PR Newswire

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Next-generation 10,000 RPM, 2.5-inch, 300 GB SATA Hard Drive, WD VelociRaptor is 35 Percent Faster and Twice the Capacity of the Previous Performance King

LAKE FOREST, Calif., April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- WD(R) NYSE: WDC announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor(TM) hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA "Raptor" series of drives. Designed with an enterprise-class foundation, the new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is modified specifically for PC and Mac(R) enthusiasts and professional workstations. Destined to become the new high-performance favorite of these groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes packed with twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation.

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080421/LAM049)

From the bloodlines of the WD Raptor, the most popular hard drive for high-performance enthusiasts who demand the ultimate SATA drive, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drive is enclosed in the IcePack(TM), a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink -- a customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.

"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."

WD VelociRaptor is the next step up for the speed-craving PC enthusiast, and as with all WD drives, attention to detail in features, performance and reliability is a top priority. Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:

     Killer Speed -- Built on the performance of the WD Raptor, these 10,000
     RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-
     bending performance.

Rock-solid Reliability -- WD VelociRaptor drives are designed and manufactured to business-critical, enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. The design results in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF.

IcePack Mounting Frame -- The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are enclosed in a 3.5-inch enterprise-class mounting frame with a built-in heat sink that keeps this powerful little drive extra cool when installed in high-performance desktop chassis.

Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF(TM)) -- Optimizes performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

SecurePark(TM) -- Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. 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.

Price and Availability

WD VelociRaptor (model WD3000GLFS) hard drives will be available on Alienware's high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. At launch, Alienware will offer maximum performance with two 300 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 configuration on www.alienware.com. WD VelociRaptor hard drives will be shipping exclusively through Alienware this month and will be available through the company's online store (http://www.shopwd.com) and at select distributors and resellers mid-May. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 300 GB is $299.99 USD. More information about WD VelociRaptor hard drives may be found on the company's Web site at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=459.

About WD

WD, one of the storage industry's pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users' data accessible and secure from loss. WD applies its storage expertise to consumer products for external, portable and shared storage applications.

WD was founded in 1970. The company's storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers, selected resellers and retailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company's Web site (http://www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to increasing demand for PC performance and expected shipment and availability dates for WD VelociRaptor. The forward-looking statements are based on WD's current expectations, and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including related to: changes in business conditions; changes in the availability and cost of commodity materials and product components that WD does not make internally; and other risks and uncertainties listed in WD's recent Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on February 5, 2008, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof, and WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

Western Digital, WD, the WD logo and WD Raptor are registered trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. WD VelociRaptor, IcePack, RAFF and SecurePark are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. One gigabyte (GB) = 1 billion bytes. One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20000711/WDCLOGO)

Website: http://www.westerndigital.com/

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Tom's hardware Review:

WD's New Raptor Drive Is a Bird of Prey!

*****************************EXCERPT*************************

The VelociRaptor Bites!

The Velociraptor was a small, carnivorous dinosaur, well known to the public since the first Jurassic Park movie. Although it was oversized in the movie and its teamwork abilities are in dispute, using the dinosaur’s name, which in Latin means "swift thief", appears to be a really smart move for manufacturer Western Digital. The company has produced a family of excellent enthusiast for years - the Raptor - and the next generation strives for providing more capacity and better performance with radically changed physical dimensions.

While everybody expected a higher capacity and higher performance version of the Raptor (which is true), Western Digital went back to the drawing table and analyzed all characteristics for a high-end hard drive. The target was to create an enthusiast hard drive that had the reliability and performance to also satisfy the workstation and low-end server market, and to make sure it can compete with Flash-based drives at least for the time being. Professional server storage applications are currently moving from the 3.5" to the 2.5" form factor, while desktop will stay at 3.5" for the predictable future. However, Western Digital found a nice way to combine the best of both worlds.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From Geek.com:

WD fights SSDs with VelociRaptor 10K RPM disk

**************************EXCERPT************************

by Sal Cangeloso posted on April 21, 2008 9:49 am

When it comes to performance desktop hard drives Western Digital’s Raptor has been on top of the pile for a long time. Ever since the 36GB model was released the 10,000 RPM hard drive has been the choice of anyone looking for great performance from a SATA disk and that continued to be the case as the Raptor moved to 74GB and then to 150GB with the Raptor X. The introduction of solid-state drives to the market is changing all that though so WD is fighting back with a new model, the VelociRaptor.

The VelociRaptor is still a mechanical (disk-based) hard drive and it still spins at 10,000 RPM but significant changes were made. Though it seems like the obvious move would have been to ramp up the RPM level, WD moved the Raptor to a 2.5-inch disk instead former 3.5-inch size, the standard for desktop hard drives. We still see a 3Gb/s SATA connection (SAS is not practical for most desktop/workstation users), but more good news is that the capacity is bumped up to 300GB. With these changes WD is claiming up to a 35 percent increase in performance of the previous Raptor.

The drive (official model name WD3000GLFS) has a 16MB cache and WD says it is built on enterprise-class quality standards. This means 1.4 million hours MTBF and a 5-year warranty to help justify it’s $300 price tag.
The 2.5-inch drive comes strapped into WD’s IcePack, a heatsink that not only cools the drive, but allows it to fit into a standard 3.5-inch drive bay. So why go the 2.5-inch route? This size is becoming the standard for commercial storage and high-density environments, but if the drive has to be used in the 3.5-inch IcePack, then it’s not really a 2.5-inch drive at all. Don’t get smart modding ideas–removing the drive from the IcePack voids the warranty.

[Reeses]

1.4 million hours MTBF.

Which means that for every 1.4 million hard drives sold, only one will burn out during the first hour of operation. Once into the second hour all bets are off. There's no way the average disk drive lasts 160 years before failing. From personal experience I'd say the real median is around 4 years.

[Malsua]

I had two 150gb 10k raptors. Hated them. Noisy as hell and in my quiet office it was irritating. I went to two Hitachi 750gbs in a Raid 0 and found that encoding movies wasn’t that much slower. The raptors saved maybe 3 seconds per minute of movie encoding. Since I don’t do clips more than 30 minutes at a time, the extra minute was worth it to cut out blue-man group performing Mandelgroove in the case.

[Nervous Tick]

>> Which means that for every 1.4 million hard drives sold, only one will burn out during the first hour of operation.

I have had fairly bad luck with WD drives over the years, so that 1 that fails will, no doubt, be mine.

Why don’t you other 1.4 million folks take up a collection and buy me that first one, and then we’ll all be off the hook. ;-)

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I wonder if this announcement was in response to This story which was out yesterday concerning ultra high density 'patterned media' drives.

[JerseyHighlander]

I have the same complaint about the noise, it’s really excessive in my 150GB RaptorX drive. I’m still using it though for the OS, but I put in a RAID that holds all other information to try to minimize the horrible speed up speed down clicking noise from the RaptorX.

[antiRepublicrat]

Which means that for every 1.4 million hard drives sold, only one will burn out during the first hour of operation.

For a real-life view, an organization that has only 1,000 of these drives among all systems can expect a drive failure about every two months. A nicer way of looking at it is that odds are your RAID with 14 drives won't have a failure for over 10 years.

[ThePythonicCow]

I have had fairly bad luck with WD drives over the years

The economy WD drives (big capacity, low cost) seem to have a mixed record. But the Raptors are a different breed of cat, and really do seem to have better performance and higher reliability than most desktop or laptop drives.

Shrinking the disk platter size makes good sense to me. The primary way to reduce seek times is to reduce seek sizes. A crude way to do this is to just not use half of a drive. But by using a smaller platter, they can get to the higher rotational speeds easier, and get the moving head and arm mechanics simpler, while leaving more space for the cooling. Heat is the primary enemy of disk longevity.

Next time I need some disks, these drives will be at the top of my shopping list. The WD drives I have on my primary PC seem much faster (like perhaps twice; I haven't measured it carefully) than the ordinary Seagate 3.5" desktop drives I use otherwise.

[ShadowAce]

[papasmurf]

They feel the heat. The war is on for SSD and HD market share! Whoopee!

[papasmurf]

It seemed that when the standard warranty was 5 years, I never lost a drive. Then they monkeyed around and went to 1 year, then to 3, and I lost about 5 drives during that time.

[antiRepublicrat]

It seemed that when the standard warranty was 5 years, I never lost a drive. Then they monkeyed around and went to 1 year, then to 3, and I lost about 5 drives during that time.

Warranties are an economic model based on statistics. You say you have A dollars to commit to paying for warranties, your product has an average failure rate of B time and cost C to fix, so you give D warranty. Your experience would say that they started making the drives with lower quality but didn't want to pay more for warranty work, so they lowered the warranty period.

[RayChuang88]

It won't take long before Western Digital ramps up the capacity of this new Serial ATA-II drive to 600 GB. At that capacity, you could include Windows Vista Ultimate Edition plus a lot of applications safely and still have plentiful storage space on the disk. It could also mean really fast loading of almost every program because you can read off the drive very quickly.

[Reeses]

A nicer way of looking at it is that odds are your RAID with 14 drives won't have a failure for over 10 years.

The odds they quote are only accurate for maybe the first year. Disk drives are like light bulbs. They all burn out. It's likely a 14 disk RAID will have some drive failures in less than 10 years, just not during the first year.

Disk drive makers have been sued many times for saying a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes instead of 1,048,576. Technically they are correct because mega means million. At some point a lawyer will make a business suing about MTBF claims.

[antiRepublicrat]

Technically they are correct because mega means million. At some point a lawyer will make a business suing about MTBF claims.

Yeah, they won't understand that the M means "mean" time between failure, just like they didn't understand that an SI megabyte is by definition 1,000,000 bytes and it's the megabyte rating for RAM that is technically incorrect. But they can't sue because you got more RAM than you paid for, can they?