Posted 03/12/09 at 03:00:10 PM by Paul Lilly

At a glance, it'd be easy to mistake Patriot's newest Warp SSD for a Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive. That's because like the VelociRaptor, Patriot plans to include a bracket with the Warp drive that converts the 2.5-inch drive into a 3.5-inch form factor.

Keep in mind that Western Digital's IcePAK was designed to help keep its 10K RPM hard drive cool. Patriot's bracket, which Fudzilla says is made out of aircraft-grade aluminum, will undoubtedly lend additional cooling prowess to the Warp SSD, but SSDs don't typically get hot in the first place.

As for the drive itself, the third-gen SSD checks in at 256GB and boasts increasingly common read and write speeds of 240MB/s and 160MB/s, respectively.

No word yet on availability or price, however according to Fudzilla, Patriot plans to give the bracket away for free with the Warp SSD.

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Posted 10/03/08 at 04:15:39 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

SSD’s are hot, but how do you mount your new 2.5-inch solid state drive  in a 3.5-inch bay without it looking ghettolicious?

The answer: Use a VelociRaptor’s extruded aluminum shell with Intel’s wicked fast SSD. The result is one a combination even better than peanut butter and chocolate if we may so say our selves.

Does it make sense to do this with a live VelociRaptor? Probably not, but we just happened to have a dead unit and rather than toss it in the garbage, we shucked out the dead drive by removing the four Torqx screws and mounted the Intel X25-M in its place. You can actually do this with a live VelociRaptor but you’ll immediately void the warranty on the drive. Does an SSD need all that aluminum to keep it cool? The answer is no, but it sure looks cool, right?

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Posted 09/09/08 at 04:47:48 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I have a brand-new rig that sports two WD Raptors in a mirrored array. I wanted the speed of the Raptors and the convenience of a mirrored array. But I wonder if a mirrored or striped array (1+0, 0+1, or some other RAID number) using four 7,200rpm drives would be faster than the above array. And how would the price compare?

Delicious, speedy answers for David after the jump. 

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Posted 08/12/08 at 11:00:00 AM by David Murphy

We’ve seen this day coming for a long time. There was no way that Western Digital was going to sit back and let other manufacturers usurp the Raptor’s place at the top of the storage speed charts. Consider the rule of the speedy terabyte drives a hiccup on the timeline. The Raptor is back: upgraded, renamed, and… physically smaller.

To read our full review of the Velociraptor (not the preview we gave you before), hit the jump.

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Posted 07/24/08 at 10:39:34 AM by Paul Lilly

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?

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Posted 06/14/08 at 08:13:59 PM by David Murphy

We've taken a look at engineering samples of Western Digital’s speedy new Velociraptor drive. Now that we have our hands on a final version of the drive, we’re ready to deliver a full review of the big beast itself. And not surprisingly, it’s every bit as fast as we anticipated.

But are you willing to trade the fastest performance ever for limited functionality? Read on to see how the critical flaw of Western Digital's Velociraptor might muck up an enthusiast's shopping list.

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Posted 06/05/08 at 04:31:36 PM by David Murphy

Now that Western Digital's final Velociraptor drives are running wild, how much did they tweak the engineering samples everyone already went nuts about?

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Posted 04/25/08 at 01:39:26 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

It's serious day on the podcast: serious processor technology, serious hard drives, and a ton of semi-serious reader Q&A! Don't miss a minute!

Subscribe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/maximumpc/1337

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