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Western Digital Announces 2.5-Inch 10K RPM Velociraptor

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While the rest of the computing world inexplicably refuses to see a market for performance hard drives spinning faster than 7,200RPM, Western Digital is finding new segments for its flagship 10,000RPM Velociraptor. The company announced today it's shrinking the stupid-fast drive down to a 2.5-inch form factor for use in blade servers and 1U and 2U servers.

"WD is bringing to enterprise customers what PC enthusiasts already appreciate about the WD Velociraptor: a combination of high performance and high capacity for hard drive storage," said John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives.

Because server environments tend to be more mission critical than the average desktop, Western Digital claims its new enterprise model will be up to the job with the "highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF."

The shrunken Velociraptor will come in both 300GB and 150GB capacities. Will anyone else join them?

Image Credit: Western Digital

COMMENTS
avatarDoes a 10k rpm drive like

Does a 10k rpm drive like this draw too much current to be practical for use in a laptop?  Or is there some other reason that WD isn't marketing these in that direction too?

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avatarI really don't think this a

I really don't think this a very big market. On servers they have to compete with SAS, which I don't think they can do. And one the desktop, I can have 2 750gb in RAID for the price of one of these.

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avatarIt looks the same as the 3.5

It looks the same as the 3.5 in VelociRaptor to me, just without the big heatsink stuck to it. That makes me wonder how much bunk the heatsink is. As Murph said in his article “the drive portion of the Veloricaptor package actually feels cooler to the touch than most hard drives we’ve tested.” We’ll have to wait for the boys in the lab to take a closer look.

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