WD speeds up 10,000 RPM SATA Velociraptor
Fast, fin, heat sunk
WD SAID it has speeded up its line of 10,000 RPM SATA Raptor series of drives by so much they now need a heatsink to cool them down.
Inevitably, WD called the drive the Velociraptor. It says the new generation WD3000GLFS, at 300GB, is twice as big and 35 per cent faster than its previous top 2.5 incher and quicker than any other drive out there.
The 2.5-inch Velociraptor sits in a 3.5-inch mount to incorporate the built-in heat sink, which sort of makes its 2.5-inch format a bit of a misnomer if you ask us.
The 10,000 RPM drives sport an SATA 3Gb/s interface a 16MB cache and, according to WD, can clock up 1.4 million hours of mean time between failures.
The drives are for sale through Alienware now and through WD and its channel from mid May.
It costs $299 in the States and rather more than that over here.
There's more exciting blurb on the company's web site here. µ
Comments
Retro disk-drive?
What is it about their "technology" that requires them to go for such enormous heat-sink surface area in 2008 when in 2004 we had 300Gb 15,000rpm HDs in 3.5" form factors without the heat issues? Are there reliability concerns in there somewhere WD?4real?
"quicker than any other drive out there."Are someone forgetting some 15K RPM drives thats out there ?
Or are these *slower spinning* drives somehow faster ?
Yes, but
is it as noisy as the dinosaur?earlier version is not as noisy as a dinosaur
The earlier Raptor version is pretty loud, yeah, but it's fairly fast (say, 25%-40%... but not mountains faster) versus say WD's SE16s. Also, if you're fairly deaf like most "music enthusiasts", it won't make a difference at all... except for the price and performance, of course.woohoo
It may be time to upgrade from my 4x74G RAID0 Raptors. All I have to say is "IMPRESSIVE" . I was going to go with SAS drives but not anymore.Are the
15k drives, sata by anychance?If not?
Shut up.
A good idea,,,
The 2.5" drive in a 3.5" format is a great idea - the heatsink means you don't need a howling fan over your drives, and the 3.5" size means you can mount them properly in 99.99% of the cases out there. I doubt it's 'heat issues', WD are perfectly capable of making drives without them.Expensive...
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-209-WD£260, OEM, inc VAT.
Certainly not on the affordable list.
False Statements
Correction, the WD Velociraptor is the fastest SATA drive. The heatsink aka "IcePack" is basically just to make the 2.5" drive fit into the current standard 3.5" bay. When tested, removing the IcePack only increased the temperature 5 degrees celcius.That's a good one :):)
it must be noisier than a Cheetah :):) but maybe not as fast as it...And I think it needs cooling because of the PCB, not the platters. The PCB gets rather hot, remember those Quantums that used to blow the I/O chip??Zoom Zoom Zoom
Not noisy or power hungry at all, check out the review. (HDD tested is an Eng. sample)http://www.storagereview.com/WD3000BLFS.sr
Doesn't require heatsink
Blurb from other news reports:"The IcePack was originally designed to fit the drive into a 3.5-inch form factor for desktop systems," she explained, noting that WD decided to take advantage of the drive size and design to utilize a passive heat sink to have it run even cooler.
The IcePack isn't necessary to keep the heat down -- it's just an added benefit, according to the company.
Icepack II sure to be released soon.
Only major issue I see is the non standard location on the sata/power connectors in regard to the 3.5" drive form factor, I'm sure we will quickly see a Icepack II which move the drive further foward and has a small PCB with plug in the drive and has a set of sata/power ports that are correctly alianed for 3.5 hot swap setup.It regard to the heatsink size it's realy just over sized 2.5 to 3.5 adapter plate, the drive runs about 43°C without the Icepack 38°C with according to toms,
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914-13.html
15k RPM drive are all SAS, meaning you need to a SAS controller to use them, SAS drives are also far more expensive by about a factor of four.
Finally! ^_^
Hi everyone. ^_^I own two of the 150GB Raptor HDDs. The reviews for those drives showed that they outperformed every SCSI drive out there but one.
The Single Platter SCSI drives that were there the fastest. I also worked with SCSI directly and saw the performance...
However, Im excited that the new 300GB Raptors are going to use SATA 3GB. The HDD does have this crazy heatsink. It does look promising.
Hard Drives are the slowest part of a system and I don't quite trust SSD drives. If you want to even consider anything decent....for gaming..
Example....(OBLIVION)
Get 8GB of RAM like I have, turn 3GB into a RAM Drive and put in Meshes and Textures as well as Sounds and Music and outside world load times would drop to 0.
The only time I buy 7200 RPM HDDs is for archival purposes. They work and some are rock solid, but I can see the difference in performance with every Raptor Generation that is released, but every time a new SCSI generation is released, there is only incremental performance....WD manages to pull double digit performance improvements per drive.
Remember you have to transfer from your HDD to System Memory and then the processor acts on it. So a faster HDD does show its performance visually to users.
Fastest
It says fastest SATA drive in the world...and it is...by a good margin. The 15,000 RPM drives only come in SCSI and SAS format.Re: Retro disk-drive
> What is it about their "technology"> that requires them to go for such
> enormous heat-sink surface area
Nothing. If you'd used one of those 10k drives you'd know that they should have been fitted with the same kind of heatsinks, or bigger.
My old Seagate Cheetah ran so hot I had to install special fans around it, just to prevent it from dying of heat exhaustion. It ran hotter than my CPU, which is saying something when you consider the CPU was a 3.6GHz Prescott ;)
SAS/SSD competition
2.5 inch 15,000rpm drives have been out since Jan. 2007. I wish WD had 2.5 and 3.5Inch 15,000RPM drives. I have had drives with 3.6ms for over five years now, nothing new under the sun. Gotta see more innovative products like I-RAM and IODrive derivatives.Faster? check the specs
I haven't checked the specs yet but the spindle speed isn't the only factor influencing speed. You can speed up the 'needle' too.Faster 'needle'
Yes, the head moves across the platter faster - average 4.3ms seek time rather than the 8ms more commonly found. This is simply a matter of physics - the head has less distance to move across a 2.5" platter than a 3.5" one.My desktop-replacement laptop could do with a new drive (more capacity would be good - only 100GB at 7200rpm on the current one) - wonder if you can pull off the heatsink and slap it in a 2.5" laptop bay?
Playstation Replacement?
Could this be okay in a PS3? If so, then I may well pick one of these bad boys up. Mmmm!Anyone know what limitations I need to stick to for PS3's?
Re: Using in a laptop
There are 2 problems with fitting this in a laptop :-1) It is 15mm high - most laptops take 9.5mm high drives, some allow for 12.5mm
2) It needs a 12V power line - laptop drives run off 5V only. (This also means it won't work in USB bus powered 2.5" SATA caddies)
Re: Using in a laptop
Actually the main reason you wouldn't want to strip off the heatsink and use it in a laptop is related to the reason it has the heatsink on it in the first place... Power consumption, and associated thermal issues caused by the fact that it's dissipating a fast 3.5" drive power budget in a 2.5" form factor.This isn't a low power drive, it's a fast and hot drive. The heatsink's there for a darn good reason!
If you strip the heatsink off, and put it into a notebook I suspect it would melt a hole through the case in a few minutes, or a hole through your leg in about an hour ;)