New Western Digital VelociRaptor Ultra-Fast Hard Drives

The data storage pioneer and a longtime leader in the hard drive industry, Western Digital has announced the launch of its new, next generation hard drives – WD VelociRaptor (model:WD3000GLFS). It’s the 300GB, 10,000rpm SATA 2.5-inch performance drive based on the company’s enterprise-class drive technology.

“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.”

Key Features Of WD VelociRaptor:

• Killer Speed – Built on the performance bloodlines of WD Raptor, these 10,000 RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-bending performance. Not only are they 35 percent faster than the previous generation WD Raptor drives, but they also beat out all other competitors in the field.
• 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.
• Double the Capacity – State-of-the-art technology packs twice the capacity per disk compared to its older brother WD Raptor resulting in 300 GB of high-performance storage space in this enterprise-class 2.5-inch drive. (Not compatible with notebook computers)
• IcePack™ Mounting Frame – The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor is 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™) – Optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
• SecurePark™ – 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.

The new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is expected to hit the market in coming mid-May for about $300 and will be available exclusively on Alienware’s high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of this April.