for that $$$ you could have four 400GB 7200rpm drives.
I once had a RAID_0 with only two 80GB 7200rpm drives that had a greater transferrate than this drive.(113MB/s)
sure you will never have a accesstime this short but in any real application on a gaming PC the enormous transferrate would make up for the wait time.
for half the price I would start to think about getting one.

Just noticed this:

"It sounds like Western Digital has worked out all the angles for the VelociRaptor, but the fact remains that bringing 10K-RPM spindle speeds down to a 2.5" form factor is no easy task. 2.5" drives are just really tiny—the actual drive that sits inside the VelociRaptor's IcePAK sled is roughly 70% smaller by volume than a standard 3.5" drive—and it's difficult to pull off miniaturization while maintaining breakneck spindle speeds."

Actually, in some respects, it's easier. Smaller platters should means less rotating mass (which affects the motor), along with reduced edge velocities and less tendency for the disk to attempt dynamic warping during operation (which affects the required material strength of the platters). Factor these together and they also mean less vibration (which affects the head precision).

This would kick major butt in a Mac Mini compared to it's current piddly 5,400rpm drive.

This review shows availability as "Now." That was April 21st. Two weeks later, where is it for sale?!

Certainly nice but I would be more likely to buy if there was a wider range of prices and capacities with similar-ish performance. I have Raptors in RAID0 for my main computer for OS, apps and file manipulation and don't miss the space, that's what a server is for. I'm just preparing for the day when SSDs are reasonable and I'll have a few of those in my main along with one storage drive and the main storage on a server. The 150GB Raptor is a fine size for this and currently not all that bad in absolute price, the 74GB is even ok too if you've got enough of them but the price/capacity isn't quite the same. If there was something like this with half the capacity and half to two-thirds the price I'd be itching to buy, as it is :shrug: I can only hope WD is working backwards with capacity this time, I know the 300GB model is meant to compete with similar capacity SAS drives.

Any idea how many platters this has? Nevermind, I missed the relevant sentence in the review. I will be looking forward to the single platter version.

Hmm, I was expecting the next line of raptors to be of the 15k variety.

I am tempted to buy a "cheap" SAS card and pick up a 15k, though I imagine it wouldn't be worth it.

Screw a new raptor, I just want a SCSI-68 to SATA 300 bridge. If WD sold those I'd be a lot happier. Surplus SCSI devices can be found on eBay for quite a bit cheaper then this and perform just as well.

It cooks the competition. It's a enterprise class drive beating down on all the other desktop class drives, but this is a enterprise class drive, it should compete with other enterprise class drives. Where are all the other enterprise class drives?

This hard drive is faster than the EDO memory in my old Pentium Pro box, which according to memtest86 transfers at just 75 MB/sec. :P

Pretty impressive stuff.

Well, I suppose it's time to put my 2 150GB Raptors up for sale and buy 2 of these babies.

Too much $ not enough increase.
I got burnt on the original Raptor, I've owned 2 36's and 1 74 and I just don't see the point - not for that amount of money.

If it was 40% quicker, across the board - SOLD but it's not, it is good of course but simply not a wise investment for anything less than the ultra hardcore.
(and I'm a hard disk performance nazi)

Now if somebody would just get Oprah to step on one and mash it down to 9mm so it would fit in my laptop I would be excited. I have a raptor 74 in my desktop now and when it dies I will probably grab the newest raptor at the time. The SATA connector is broke on mine thanks to my own stupidity so it might die sooner rather than later.

IMO, VelociRaptor is not that impressive at all. Raptor family had its time in the spotlight, however 7200RPM drives have caught up performance-wise with far superior capacity.

VelociRaptor is just a 2.5 "SAS" drive market and engineered to go towards "enthusiast" crowd. It only has a significant performance edge over competition in server, workstation environments. It otherwise offers very little in general single-user usage over 7200RPM with a far higher GB/$ premium.

I could see VelociRaptor finding themselves a home in entry-level and mid-range servers where cost of SAS solution would go over the budget.

Nice review, extremely comprehensive. There's definitely a market for this drive, but I think I'll give it a miss due to the value proposition for me, personally.

In the server environment I will definitely use these from now on, they are perfect for that role.

I will however wait a bit before I put it in my home PC since I have a Raid 0 set-up with Raptors so I do not see the immediate benefit in these.

Good article, very thorough!

"breaks bold new ground by bringing 10K-RPM spindle speeds to a 2.5" drive buried inside a heatsink that slides into a standard 3.5" drive bay. Read on to see why this is a brilliantly ambitious idea"
"The benefits of a 2.5" form factor go beyond drive density, though. Smaller platters give the drive head a much smaller area to cover."
aren't 10k and 15k platterns always smaller than the 7.5k?
I don't think this is new, it is just the casing, they used to put the smaller platterns in 3.5" cases, likely being bigger than those now in 2.5" cases.

Those are some big lower back fins. I wonder why they didn't make them thinner and more numerous.

The heatsink is only attached to the bottom of the VRaptor, but from what I know the bottom of the hard drive is the most perforated?

Most hard drive makers have managed to get their 2.5" mobile drives up to 5,400 and 7,200 RPM, but so far, Seagate is the only other manufacturer to hit 10,000 RPM.

(emphasis mine)

NO. The other manufacturers of SAS drives, Hitachi and Fujitsu, also have small form factor (SFF, i.e. 2.5") drives, e.g. Hitachi's C10K147 and Fujitsu's MBB2147RC, among other models. They're particularly popular in blade servers.

In case you meant that the Savvio is a mobile drive, it is not. It's an SFF drive meant for data centers. There's no 10,000 rpm Momentus (Seagate's mobile line).

Please check your facts the next time.

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/en/menuitem.03e21da75b9c0cb04... (C10K147)
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/enterprise... (MBB2147RC and MBB2073RC)
http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__product.asp?pid=502&inf=fsp&wg=83 (MAY2073RC)
http://193.128.183.41/home/v3__product.asp?pid=501&inf=fsp&wg=83 (MAY2036RC)

Good article. Thanks. Though I no longer regularly participate in the upgrade race, I do have 2, 15k Cheetahs that are getting long in the tooth and could be replaced by one of these. Hmmm....

A typo/clarification:

From page 2:
High spindle speeds have always allowed Raptors to offer incredibly low seek times

Spindle speed (platter RPM) is mostly irrelevant to seek time (at a low level it may impact head settling time). It directly determines rotational latency and the total access time = seek time + rotational latency.

I know where my economic stimulus rebate is going.

wd killed it as you cannot put the drive in notebooks. the only benefit is noise and temp. otherwise, performance is comparable to many drives out there.

Riddle me this: how does WD squeeze 150gb on platter inside a 10k RPM 2.5" drive, while the biggest 7200 RPM 2.5" notebook drive has 100gb platters?

Thank you WD, Thank you from the bottom of my techie heart for not using the "extreme" moniker.

That being said, I was amazed at the idle power draw, and even the under heavy use draw. To me, this almost seems worth the price justification. Almost.

I bet the price for this drops pretty quickly. The premium is too much.

Great article, as usual. I'd like to nitpick one minor thing though:
Western Digital, a plucky desktop drive maker with no background in SCSI hardware
Actually, WD used to make SCSI drives back in the mid to late 90s. At a previous job, I remember installing a pair of 4.5GB WD Enterprise drives on an Adaptec 2940UW controller. They were fast drives, but ran extremely hot.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/library/legacy/scsi/index.asp

I wonder if they'll take off one platter (making the drive into 150GB), reduce the height of it (possible with removing one platter?) so that it can fit into a laptop?

I appreciate the washing machine reference particularly because the first hard drive I saw was the size of a washing machine.

http://bp.cocolog-nifty.com/bp/images/the_first_harddisk.jpg
http://davidguy.brinkster.net/computer/023.html

Oh crap...since the serial ATA ports are seemingly located on the center of the back of the drive now, they won't fit in the sleds on the HP Blackbird 002.

I just found my boot drive for my hackintosh.

I predicted not too long ago (http://www.techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=51784&p=729755) that until SSD vendors get their act together, 2.5inch drives are the future of enthusiast storage. I'd guess that WD thinks the same :p
Congratulations to WD.