Western Digital has announced the successor to the famous Raptor series, and it brings many improvements. VelociRaptor, which is the name of the new series, is not just up to 35% faster, but also sports twice the storage capacity of the previous series, up to 300GB. The most astonishing move though, is that the VelociRaptor is not a 3.5″ harddrive, but 2.5″. However, it’s enclosed in what WD calls IcePack, which both cools the harddrive and let you mount it in a regular 3.5″ bay.
“Demand for ever-higher PC performance continues to increase and WD is the leader in this category with the WD Raptor. We created WD VelociRaptor hard drives to lead PC enthusiasts into the next era of PC and Mac storage performance and satisfy their insatiable thirst for computing speed,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD’s enterprise business unit. “The new WD VelociRaptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market.”
Much like the predecessor, it sports 10,000RPM platters, SATA 3Gbps interface and 16MB cache. The MTBF is rated at 1.4 million hours, which should prove enough for most people.
The drive will be sold exclusively through Alienware for the first month, but become available in stores around mid-May. WD VelociRaptor 300 GB MSRP is $299.99.
