150 GB WD Raptor - Soon to Be Available

Western Digital Corp. today announced that it has doubled the capacity of its next-generation 10,000 RPM WD Raptor enterprise Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive to 150 GB and has increased the performance of the popular drive with additional features for server and networked storage applications.

"WD continues to lead the industry with the broadest enterprise SATA lineup: WD Raptor delivers enterprise reliability and performance, and the company's RAID Edition drives WD Caviar RE and WD Caviar RE2 deliver enterprise capacity and reliability," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage for WD. "Building on customer demand and market adoption for enterprise SATA drives, the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives available."

The new 150 GB WD Raptor maintains its high performance in servers and networked storage, where rotational vibration from multiple spinning hard drives robs performance, with its RAFF(TM) (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology.

The next-generation drive also offers best-in-class random I/O performance with native command queuing (NCQ), which increases performance by intelligently ordering multiple simultaneous read and write commands, which is common in demanding, multi-user workloads such as servers. Sixteen MB cache furthers the drive's ability to serve and record data quickly for multiple users. The drive offers an average seek time of 4.6 milliseconds (ms).

The enterprise-class mechanical and electronics platform of WD Raptor is designed to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment. Continuing to be the world's most reliable SATA hard drive, WD Raptor is reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments and is backed by a five-year warranty.

WD Raptor 150 GB (model WD1500ADFD) hard drives are currently shipping in volume. Estimated retail pricing for WD Raptor is $299.99 USD. With an average price of 2$/GB, the 150 GB WD Raptor is a good deal, having the performance and reliability of SCSI at significantly less cost. Contrary to online sources such as pcstats.com or hardwarenews.com, we found WD Raptor 150 GB not available for the moment on the company's online store.