Western Digital Reveals New Velociraptor Drives [WD Puts Support Behind New Raptor Drives, Not Quite As Fast As SSDs]

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Western Digital has announced they’re “digging up” some new Velociraptor (stylized VelociRatpor in the press release) hard drives. For those who missed the craze back in 2003, Western Digital’s Velociraptor drives are super fast (10,000RPM) hard drives that promised faster performance than anything at the time, but were notoriously expensive, were a bit small on the storage side, and had widespread reports of failing.

Granted, Western Digital has been producing their Raptor drives diligently for a while now, but it seems in my estimate that their allure in the home-built computer community has long since worn off. Plus, with solid-state drives, do we need new super-fast physical hard drives? Storage giant Western Digital thinks so, so they’re coming out with a few new models.

The new Raptor drives, like the ones before it, are actually 2.5-inch drives (for servers, not laptops) but will come in a 3.5-inch IcePack mounting/cooling frame so you can easily mount it inside your computer case like a normal hard drive. It’s got the latest in interfaces, going with SATA 6Gbp/s (or SATA 3.0, whatever you want to call it). As mentioned, these HDDs will spin up at 10,000RPM. They’ll also come with a 32MB cache. Overall, the new improvements have granted the new Raptors a 15% increase from the previous generations.

They’ll come in a few capacities, mainly 150GB, 300GB, 450GB and 600GB. No word on pricing, but they’ll probably be expensive. Now the big question, do we need these super-fast drives when SSDs are out there? In a home computing environment, you should only be saving your boot files to these drives – not downloading the complete series of Battlestar Galactica to them. With these, you’ll probably be paying the same price as an SSD for less transfer speed and more capacity. Your call, I suppose.

Will your next fast drive purchase be a solid-state drive or a WD Raptor?