News WD announces VelociRaptor hard drives

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/22/western_digital_announces_velociraptor_hard_drives/1

Western Digital has announced the VelociRaptor, the successor to the hugely successful Raptor hard drives and it claims to be the world's fastest drive.

 

Want for Raid 1 config. Hopefully the UK market wont get hit hard with the prices.

Sam

Edit. Scan UK have these listed on their site here. Uk Price is £252.61

 

interesting, though I don't even have enough money for an old 150GB raptor.
I remember seeing SCSI drives that went 15000RPM and up to 300GB at said speed. perhaps they could be a better buy for the speedfreaks(in addition to a suitable raid card for SCSI connector{s})

 

$300 = £252

still, 300gb of super fast storage is very tempting, even at that price premium.

 

I can have a 2 terabyte for that amount of money.

 

But it's a genuine performance difference and unfortunately you can't overclock slower hard drives

It's enterprise level for consumers.

 

Seriously? the price premium is 6x... I'd much rather have a 1.5TB raid10 array than one of those, it'd be about the same price.

But then they aren't exactly meant to be good bang for buck now are they

 

The price will come down soon enough. What we have in the mean time is smaller, lighter, faster, quieter, cooler, more power efficient. Win all around.

 

lol wtf is Scan doing with those prices...I will pay the shipping and buy from the US thanks

 

Yea and get hit with tax, vat and import duty. So you would end up paying about £350 anyway.

 

I'll be picking one up next time I'm in the states - I suspect the UK price will take a nose dive as soon as these are actually available, but would be surprised even then to see it less than £200

Would be nice to see 150GB and 74GB models on the way, home users don't need 300Gb of fast storage.

 

ditto.

 

Well if you have every high-end game then that's getting to be almost 8-10gb a game.

(Also $1 a GB doesn't sound bad to me. Especially for Raptor speed?)

 

A raptor doesn't do much (if anything) for games - just OS and apps

In a typical config you would have a raptor as an OS & app drive and a fast 7200rpm drive for games and storage

 

I do the oposite, fast 7200rpm for windiows apps and storage and all games and other performance stuff on 150gb raptor. I do notice a difference not in fps but in load times, about twice as fast load in bf2.

 

i went for 2x500GB HDDS in Raid 0
these infact http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/114085/samsung-spinpoint-t166-hd501lj.html
super fast and happy with them, too little too late for the raptors as most people i know are looking at raid 0 if they need perfromace.
Also as the HDDS increase in size platter density increases so times seek/read times decrease so the cap between normal HDDs and raptors will fall

 

i'd love to put 2x150 in RAID-0. but 2x300? that's... overkill for my taste. i'll b tempted to put too many stuff on it, and when the whole thing fails... poof. smaller the better for me. not so much for money i suppose. 1Gb/$ is darn good for the performance.

 

True, but the gains you see in daily use are next to nothing. Unless you actually have enterprise-level needs (RAW HD video footage or photoshopping insanely huge files), the bottleneck still tends to be the computer pondering about what it should do with the data for a while.

 

i have to disagree.

on paper (im not 100% sure), the data output rate of any component in your computer is significantly higher than your harddrive. therefore, increasing a significant boost to ur HD rate (if ur coming from a barracuda 7200.9 to this velociraptor)(i love that name btw), will boost ur overall performance by a significant value as well.

on practice, coming from 80gb 7200.9 to 2x80Gb RAID-0 feels a heck lot more than 'next to nothing'. <disclaimer: results may vary >

 

Ditto as well.

EDIT:

http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14583/2 <- in between the two pics. Now we just need a single platter 74 gig model that's limited to the outer half of the surface and the speed graph will fall down even less