Western Digital Releases VelociRaptor 1 TB HDD

HDDs are the name of Western Digital's game, and there never passes too much time without some new storage device making its way out of its labs.

What we mean to say is that a new hard drive unit has appeared, called WD VelociRaptor and featuring a capacity of 1 TB.

Long story short, it is a magnetic platter-based storage device that has enterprise-grade specifications, but isn't solely restricted to that field.

In fact, not only can Apple Mac systems benefit from the drive, but so can high-performance personal computers, assuming owners figure it is worth paying the price.

Speaking of which, the 1 TB VelociRaptor has a MSRP of $319.99, which is pretty much the same thing as 244 Euro.

There are 500 GB and 250 GB versions of the product as well, tagged at $209.99 / 160 Euro and $159.99 / 122 Euro, respectively.

"WD is committed to providing customers with the best performing and most reliable SATA hard drives and our WD VelociRaptor family of drives underscores that promise," said Darwin Kauffman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise storage. 

"With ever-increasing demand for greater capacity, the new 1 TB WD VelociRaptor drive delivers the ultimate combination of speed and storage for the power user."

Western Digital's VelociRaptor has a platter rotary speed of 10,000 RPM (rotations per minute), the SATA 6.0 Gbps interface and a cache memory of 64 MB.

There is also a 3.5-inch heatsink, for placing the 2.5-inch unit inside a PC case without the thermal load growing that much.

Other specs include transfer speeds of up to 206MB/s, a low power consumption (the same as on the lower-capacity, 600 GB predecessor), Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward / RAFF (optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis) and NoTouch ramp load technology (the recording head never touches the disk media, ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media, as well as better drive protection when in transit).

Posted in: Hardware, Preview