Western Digital Refreshes VelociRaptor HDDs with SATA 6Gbps and 32MB Cache

Western Digital has quietly refreshed two of its products in the iconic VelociRaptor hard disk drives series with support for the SATA 6Gbps interface as well as with larger caches in order to deliver improved performance.

The two new drives to get these additions are the 150GB and 300GB versions of the VelociRaptor HLHX hard drive models, which previously featured only 16MB of cache and support for SATA 3Gbps.

Both HDDs introduced recently by Western Digital sport a spindle speed of 10,000RPM, have a latency of 3ms, and an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.4 million hours.

According to the manufacture, the updated specs enable the drives to reach sequential transfer speeds of up to 126 MB/s.

No information regarding the release date of these drives is available yet, but European retailers have already listed the two models at €120 and €144, respectively.

As a result of this refresh, Western Digital is now shipping a total of six VelociRaptor models with SATA 6Gbps and eight models having 32MB cache.

Western Digital's Raptor line of hard disk drives made its debut in 2003 and were the first consumer drives to have a spindle speed of 10,000RPM, which enabled them to deliver great performance in most day-to-day applications.

This made them a huge hit among enthusiasts who used Raptor drives, often in RAID 0 configurations, to power their systems.

However, its success was quickly overshadowed by the first generations of solid state drives that provided much better performance without the lags that are characteristic for HDDs.

Until recently, only the 450GB and 600GB VelociRaptor models featured SATA 6Gbps support and 32MB of cache. (via Fudzilla)