facebook rss twitter

Western Digital shrinks VelociRaptors for enterprise duty

by Parm Mann on 24 July 2008, 15:54

Tags: WD (NYSE:WDC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaoir

Add to My Vault: x

Austin Modine of The Register reports:

Western Digital is making a play for the enterprise storage market today by stripping the bulky heat sink attached to its 10,000RPM VelociRaptor drives and liberating the small form-factor disk that's been locked inside all along.

The number two hard drive supplier technically has offered a 2.5-inch VelociRaptor HDD since April, but claimed that so great was its speed the drive required a 3.5-inch mount to incorporate a built-in heat sink.

Enter the VelociRaptor WD3000BLFS SATA drive apparently cooly content sans mount, and suited for sweltering work inside blade servers and 1U/2U rack trays.

Its specs are similar to WD's current Raptor drives made for high-end consumers.

The new enterprise HDD is offered with up to 300GB raw storage capacity with a SATA 3 Gb/s interface and 16MB cache. But it does consume 35 per cent less power than previous generation Raptor drives, according to WD. Mean time to failure is benchmarked at a healthy 1.4 million hours.

One new feature is Rotary Active Feed Forward (RAFF), which is described as optimising performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.

The VelociRaptor is presently the only small form-factor SATA 10K drive out there. Other vendors such as Seagate offer 10,000RPM and 15,000RPM 2.5-inch drives, but only of the SAS persuasion.



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Pretty much the first thing SPCR did with their velociraptor was to take that stupid heat sink off. With even moderate airflow it isn't required and when off it is apparently one of the quietest drives avaliable today, but quite the opposite with it on.
Hmm, I wonder who will be the first to put these in a laptop…
Here are the two drives on their website- as you can see there are a 300 and 150 GB version for the 2.5" enterprise drive.

WD3000BLFS and WD1500BLFS at www.wdc.com
dave87
Hmm, I wonder who will be the first to put these in a laptop…

I suppose it would fit in the bulkier 17" jobbies. It would be intersting to see how they perform in laptops as I'm sure they will get warm to say the least.
does any manufacturer do a multi drive external or internal enclosure that can take 2,3, or 5 western digital 2.5inch drives to make a very fast raid array? It sounds like a possibility for a very compact video raid array.