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The VelociRaptor Arrives

The Beast has been Unleashed.

It sometimes takes a bit of time to prefect and enhance one of the worlds fastest hard drives currently about. Western Digital has once more achieved this with today’s preview of the updated New Raptor and all it has to offer.

The first thing that we are taken aback with is the actual size form factor. Yes, it’s a 2 ½” drive condensed into the 3 ½” bay. With a current native capacity of 300GB which is made up of 2 x 160GB platters running along nicely still at 10,000 rpm. Now up at the full 3 GB/s and maintaining the full 16MB buffer Cache. Not only have Western Digital maintained the high performance ratio of the drive, but shrank the disc right down. We will cover more of these salient points later on when the drive arrives.

The target audience, many high end gamers, enthusiasts and enterprise users alike must be extremely excited with what this new drive has to offer.

So let’s firstly look at a few salient facts that need to be covered, though many of these facts will have a few salivating;

Form Factor

•3.5-inch, 10,000 RPM (2.5-inch HDA, 15mm z-height)
•2 platters, 4 heads
•Ships mounted in the WD-IcePAK™for placement into 3.5-inch slot

Program/Product Lines

•WD VelociRaptor
•Product family –VR150
•Model –WD3000GLFS

	WD Raptor EL150	WD VelociRaptor VR150
Features
Models & Capacity	150 GB , 74 GB, 36 GB	300 GB
Buffer Size	16 MB	16 MB
Interface	SATA 1.5 GB/s	SATA 3 GB/s
Reliability
MTBF	1.2M hrs	1.4M hrs
Warranty	5 years	5 years
Performance
Seek Time (Read)	4.7 ms	4.2 ms
Seek Time (Write)	5.9 ms	4.7 ms
Read IOPS (QD=1)	124	134
Sustained Data Rate	88 MB/s	120 MB/s
Environmental
Operating Temp Ambient	5-55 ambient, 60 max case	5-55 ambient, 60 max case
Temperature Change Rate (Op/Non-Op)	20C / 30C per hour	20C / 30C per hour
Non-operating Temperature	-40 to 70 ambient	-40 to 70 ambient
Acoustic
Idle:	29 dBA	29 dBA
Seek (avg):	36 dBA	36 dBA
Ramp Load/unload	N/A	2 (sones)

The Western Digital IcePAK

So what does this unique piece of equipment bring to this awesome sneaky 2 ½” drive. Lets have a swift look and all will be simply be revealed with the pictures below.

A comparison of WD VelociRaptor thermal output; both in and out of WD IcePAK
WD IcePAK reduces the drive temp by an average of 7.1 degrees C

With The Beast Unleashed, lets have a look at the performance figures presented overleaf and swiftly conclude for now.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Performance and Conclusions

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