Western Digital Reportedly Breeding New Velociraptor Drives
Western Digital Reportedly Breeding New Velociraptor Drives
Posted 07/25/2011 at 9:19am
| by Paul Lilly
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It used to be that if you were looking to put together a high end rig with as few compromises as possibles, you rolled with a Western Digital Velociraptor. Today enthusiasts are more likely to opt for a solid state drive when looking to address the storage bottleneck at any cost, but this shift in power hasn't yet rendered the Velociraptor extinct (or if it has, somebody forget to tell Western Digital).
News and rumor site Fudzilla says Western Digital has begun shipping updated 150GB and 300GB Velociraptor drives. These revamped models now offer native SATA 6Gb/s support and sport 32MB of cache just like the 450GB and 600GB models, whereas the two lower capacities used to be saddled with SATA 3Gb/s and 16MB of cache.
We didn't manage to find any U.S. e-tailers selling these upgraded models just yet, but according to Fudizlla, overseas sellers have them listed for about 20 percent higher than the models they're replacing.
Image Credit: Western Digital
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whathuhitwasntme
July 25, 2011 at 3:25pm
I dunno
my OS lives on a 74gb raptor and I have a 2tb and a 1tb behind it for mass storage
I can boot win7 ultimate and be working in under a minute, I get past the splash screen in 30 seconds range typically
so yeah they are not SSDs but they are still wicked fast for mechanical drives if you just want to speed up your os you dont need 2tbs for it. In fact massive OS drives slow you down, as you have more room to fragment in my opinion.
Wrenchski
July 25, 2011 at 2:21pm
I'm typing this using a triple raid zero 74G raptor array...bought them when they first came out and see no need to replace them until somebody can tell me just how long an overpriced SSD will last...something about them slowing down as you use them comes to mind also...
neo_mouse
July 25, 2011 at 12:46pm
32MB of cache?!?! really? i mean come on there green drives have more then that. and there 2tb black drive is as fast or faster in some test.
if you really want my money... give me a 1tb drive with 128mb cache, sata6 and come in under $250
i dont think i am asking for the moon here. but maybe i am?
RUSENSITIVESWEETNESS
July 25, 2011 at 10:14am
SSDs are ridiculously expensive. It will be years before I can afford to put them in any machine I build. I'm much more likely to use a pair of fast mechanical drives in RAID 0 for affordable speed.
Holly Golightly
July 25, 2011 at 10:02am
I will always love velociraptor. Their cool heat sync makes the velociraptor the most stylish drive in the market. Worthy of showing off. The SSDs just look to plain for my taste. Regular mechanical hard drives are a major turn off. But the Velociraptor is on a league of its own. Faster than other hard drives at a price that is more affordable than an SSD. Making the velociraptor the perfect medium. With that said... I want to see larger sized velociraptors in the market. 1TB to me, should be the standard... Because sometimes 600GB is just not enough. With that said, I wonder what will be their next design?
Holly Golightly
July 25, 2011 at 7:02pm
Umm, Marx is dead. He can not think of what hard drives I want to get. How about sticking to the topic for once? Gosh, Snoozers the Losers these days.
Cache
July 25, 2011 at 9:39am
Unless they plan on selling these drives at $80, there isn't much room to buy tech that was hot two years ago and no longer has real application value.
Keith E. Whisman
July 25, 2011 at 9:34am
Man they are going freaking backwards here. If they are going to building a mechanical drive then it needs to be somehting like a 2TB drive running at 10,000RPM and be a hybrid with an 8GB SSD built in for speed. There really is no longer any compelling reason to spend the bucks on velociraptor drives.
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