Western Digital VelociRaptor SATA Hard Drive Touted as World’s Fastest SATA HDD [WD3000GLFS]

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Following on from the news concerning Fujitsu’s new Full AES-256 Encrypted HDD (also billed as a world’s first), Western Digital have today announced its new WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor SATA Hard Drive which, Western Digital proudly claims, is the world’s fastest SATA hard drive, and will initially be offered with Alienware’s ALX gaming desktop PCs.

Western Digital’s VelociRaptor HDD, a next gen model in WD’s Raptor series of HHDs, sports 300GB of storage capacity courtesy of its 10,000rpm 2.5” drive which, according to WD’s press release, offers a 35 percent performance increase over previous models in its Raptor range.

WD WD3000GLFS VelociRaptor Features:

• Killer Speed – Built on the performance of the WD Raptor, these 10,000 RPM drives, with SATA 3 Gb/s interface, and 16 MB cache deliver mind-bending performance.
• 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.
• IcePack Mounting Frame – The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drives are 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 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.

‘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.’

Due to be made available initially with Alienware’s ALX gaming desktop PC by the end of April, those looking to purchase WD’s VelociRaptor as an separate upgrade unit will have to wait until mid-May for the 300GB device to become more widely available with WD suggesting a price point of around $300.

Western Digital