Western Digital holds the speed crown when it comes to hard drives with its
10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive. The drive was originally aimed at the
performance consumer PC market when it launched and today the company announced
a new version of the VelociRaptor that is aimed at enterprise usage.
Western Digital says that the enterprise VelociRaptor uses an
enterprise-class 2.5-inch form factor for blade and 1U/2U servers in a rack.
The drive has a 300GB storage capacity and consumes 35% less power than
previous Raptor hard drives.
The enterprise
VelociRaptor is designed to enterprise standards for reliability in demanding
computing environments. The SATA VelociRaptor has the highest mean time between
failure rating of any SATA drive on the market at 1.4 million hours according
to Western Digital.
Despite the smaller 2.5-inch form factor, the enterprise VelociRaptor
maintains the 10,000 RPM speed, SATA 3 GB/s interface and 16MB cache found on
the consumer version. You may recall when DailyTech first reported on the VelociRaptor
for the 3.5-inch enthusiast market the drive itself was actually only a
2.5-inch inside a larger cooling block to make the drive fit in standard
3.5-inch slots in a PC chassis.
Western Digital didn’t mention power savings when the VelociRaptor 3.5-inch
was first introduced in April, but all the features of the enterprise class
VelociRaptor are the same as the 3.5-inch drive minus the IcePack heatsink.
Western Digital says the enterprise version of the drive is currently
undergoing evaluation with OEM customers and will be available via select
retailers at the end of the month. Pricing information was not offered, but
considering it is the same drive as the 3.5-inch with the heatsink missing it
would be reasonable to expect it to come in at the same $299.99 price point or
even a bit under that mark.