Velociraptor bites into hard drive market (and Error'd)

ROAR! It's IT Blogwatch: in which Western Digital offers its latest amazingly speedy 10K RPM drive. Not to mention more loopy error messages...

Brian Fonseca reports:

Western Digital Corp. today launched the first model of its new 2.5-in. VelociRaptor VR 150 hard-drive product line, which company executives said offers about twice the capacity of the 2.5-in. Raptor hard drive it will replace ... the new drive will be shipped with a new 3.5-in. mounting frame, called WD IcePak, which enables the hard drive to fit into standard workstation slots. The IcePak frame includes a built-in heat sink that can reduce the drive's heat output by as much as 7 degrees ... The new four-head VelociRaptor drive features a sustained data rate of 120MB/sec., spins at speeds of up to 10,000 rpm, supports a 3Gbit/sec. interface speed and has 16MB cache ... can write and read data at 5.9 and 4.7 milliseconds, respectively, which outpaces the data-access times of its predecessor, the 150GB WD Raptor EL 150 [significantly]. more

Melissa J. Perenson is a self-admitted storage geek:

Western Digital picked an extremely appropriate name for its new 10,000 rpm (rotations per minute) hard drive. Dubbed the VelociRaptor, this new drive screamed through the PC World Test Center's performance tests. Velocity is clearly the raison d'etre for this drive: The VelociRaptor handily bested our tested field of hard drives to become our top overall performer. Unlike many hard drives, which show strengths and weaknesses in our tests, the $300 VelociRaptor actually demonstrated its strength across the PC World Test Center's entire suite of hard drive tests. In one of its most impressive feats, the VelociRaptor required just 89 seconds to write 3.06GB of files and folders, besting the next-best drive in our chart, the Western Digital Caviar SE16 750GB, by 32 seconds--a 26 percent improvement. more

Austin Modine wonders if size is important (as the spammers claim):

Obviously Western Digital is less concerned with capacity than it is about performance in the Raptor line ... Although VelociRaptor shares a (still impressive) 10,000 RPM spindle speed and 16MB cache with its predecessor, WD says the new drive bumps access times and data transfer rates by a healthy 35 per cent ... Other reliability features include Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) for vibration-prone environments and parking the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. The VelociRaptor family will replace the Raptor X gear over time. more

Gary Key unlocks his benchmarks: [You're fired -Ed.]

To address the enterprise market, WD will ship the drive without the IcePAK chassis ... the IcePAK mounting system does not work with standard SATA backplanes ... the form factor matches that of Seagate's Savvio enterprise drives and should easily plug and play where those drives are utilized ... At 27.2 dB(A), this drive is almost one of the quieter drives we have tested and the results are just exceptional for a 10k RPM product ... leads our test group in both idle and load thermals ... The VelociRaptor just decimates the competition in our overall score results, unless you count the almost ridiculous benchmark scores of the Mtron SSD drive ... Our question was if the capacity could be increased; we did not get an answer, but we did detect a smirk from our contact. more

Mark Wilson cannae change the laws of physics:

It's just a matter of time before someone rips off that heatsink and fits this 2.5" monster into a laptop. more

David Murphy makes the less-obvious movie reference:

Western Digital engineers must have been watching Honey I Shrunk The Kids when they were brainstorming for new storage ideas ... [but] removing the Velociraptor drive from its Icepak voids the warranty. It's also pointless. Western Digital told us that the Velociraptor's power requirements exclude it from abeing ble to be used in laptops ... the Velociraptor beats its peers in every single category we test. Five for five. Gold medal. Epic win ... but the Velociraptor is simply no match for a solid-state device. In the real-world PCMark05 suite of tests, a single solid-state drive is 80 percent faster than a single Velociraptor and 47 percent faster than a pair of Velociraptors in a RAID 0 configuration. If you can survive the burning hole in your bank account, a solid-state drive is still the Holy Grail of speedy storage. more

Joel Johnson is amused by WD's PR mavens:

What I am most tickled by is this line from the press release email, which paints a much more entertaining picture than marketroid speak typically allows: "In short, there’s a new Sheriff in town and its name is VelociRaptor." more

And finally...

• A Numbers Game

Buffer overflow:

• Rough Type: Open source as corporate joint venture
• Robert X. Cringely II: Save the whales, save XP
• Ben Goertzel: Artificial Wisdom
• StorageMojo: Holographic storage debuts next month
• Mike Masnick: Cablevision Caught Blatantly Lying To Customers About Digital TV Switch
• Michael Arrington: Encyclopedia Britannica Now Free For Bloggers
• Matt Ford: Superconductor breakthroughs abound: some like it hot
• Wayne Smallman: Internet access as a basic human right
• Jan-Ã…ke Larsson: Broken Quantum Cryptography FAQ

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Angela Gunn: Data destruction, Atari, and security ambivalence
• Michael R. Farnum: Stopping at compliance
• Preston Gralla: Study: Microsoft is a more powerful brand than Apple
• Mike Elgan: Why the Amazon Kindle is a tourist's best friend
• Don Tennant: Over the top
• Mark Hall: Dump Exchange. Keep Outlook. Or not.
• Douglas Schweitzer: Anyone remember "Crush, Kill, Destroy"?
• Shark Tank: Splitsville
• Shark Bait: Out of paper

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Big phishing problem "bears fruit" at Toorcon (and he's dead, Jim)
• Red Hat abandons desktop Linux for consumers (and RC-SMB)
• Windows XP SP3 dates leaked? (and NH5D)