Western Digital introduces 10,000 RPM 2.5" HDD

It may not fit notebooks yet, but it is coming as soon as they find another way to cool it down...


Western Digital introduces 10,000 RPM 2.5" HDD

Western Digital on Monday unveiled what it is terming the world’s fastest SATA hard drive, a 10,000-rpm model aimed at the enthusiast PC and professional workstation markets. WD’s new WD VelociRaptor 2.5-inch hard drive provides up to 300 Gbytes capacity, and is based on the company’s enterprise-class drive technology. The drive is enclosed in WDC’s IcePack. IcePack is a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink which the Lake Forest, Calif.-based storage vendor said fits in a standard 3.5-inch system bay and provides extra cooling for high-performance desktop PC and workstation applications.

The new WD VelociRaptor hard drives’ performance comes from its 10,000-rpm speed, a 3-Gbytes-per-second SATA interface, and a built-in 16-Mbyte cache. The company said the drives have a mean time between failure (MTBF) rate of 1.4 million hours. Also included are such SATA features as rotary acceleration feed forward to optimize performance in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis, and SecurePark, which parks the heads off the disk surface while the drive is spinning up, spinning down, and off to ensure that the head never touches the disk surface, the company said. The drives are expected to be available through WD distributors and solution providers starting in mid-May with a suggested list price of $299.99.

Source: CRN

***ADDED/EDITED***

Updated info and pictures... see page 3-15 for benchmark... whoa it is FAST.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583

Official WD site: http://www.wdvelociraptor.com/

 

Cool but im willing to bet a lower rev 3.5" hdd will be faster and also cheaper. The smaller the drive the smaller its performance and they have been pushing performance up with higher density platters in the drive, but still they can incorporate that into a 3.5" drive for a higher benefit aswell.

Me personally I have a 120mm fan blowing right over my HDD's in my desktop and they stay nice and cool, the heatsink is not going to do much for me and I find all 3.5" drives do just fine without them.

 

Yes and no. As of this moment, I think you're still right. But remember the 5.25" HDD?

 

Hmm, when a hard drive comes stock with a large heatsink like, that it's likely that heat would be a problem without them. This will never work in a notebook.

 

Yeah but its not the same tech, right now they are all the same tech and physics are what separate them.

Spin a 10" saw blade a 5000rpm and a 5" blade at 5000rpm and the 10" blade has more speed anywhere outside of that 5" radius and in the case of a HDD that means more surface area to read in a given time and so better speeds. Thats my lamans way of saying it anyways.

I just dont see the point of shrinking a drive down to put a heatsink on it, one way or another you lose out. Be it speed or size of the drive, I see no nitche on the market for this product at all unless somebody wants a ultra quiet server and these things do not require active cooling. Even in that case I would still get 3.5" drives to save $$$ and use some of that $$$ to get ultra quiet fans.

 

That's true. I'm confused too as why they went with 2.5" and put a 3.5" case around it. I guess they just wanted to show people that they're the first one to do it with a 2.5".

 

Another thing I forgot to mention, they're also trying to claim this as the fastest SATA hard drive in the world, which means it's supposed to be faster than any other SATA 3.5" HDDs if I'm reading the information correctly.

 

It's possible that they have increased the density of the platters, therefore, reversing any negative effects of decreasing the overall size as Vicious has briefly used his analogy above.

 

I think its due to the huge heatsink needed. It would be nice to put it into like a clevo, but the heat would be killer.

 

That's probably what they did, I guess soon they could apply the same density onto their 3.5" HDDs to make it even faster. But claiming 1st is always good in the IT world.

 

Hmm I dunno if you were using a high end application setup like a server and needed ultra fast drives there are 15,000rpm drives out there like these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014+1035507779&name=15,000+RPM

Then you could just convert them into SATA if you needed with something like this:

http://www.pc-pitstop.com/scsi_ide_adapters/aec7730.asp

The SATA interface has more than enough bandwidth to support the drive, they just done make them in SATA usually because SCSI is standard hardware for applications that use drives like that.

 

Yep pretty much thats the only real point I can see out of this.

 

Yeah SCSI is for sure faster, what I meant was in the SATA category.

 

OK, these guys are talking smack! Until it is on the market all is a no brainier! I do not even believe this.

 

You better believe it...

Western Digital's VelociRaptor VR150 hard drive - Availability: Now

See page 3-15 for benchmark... it is fast...

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14583

Official WD site: http://www.wdvelociraptor.com/

 

ViciousXUSMC, D3X... interesting...

Seems like 2.5" might be the future of desktop, and SSD will be for laptop...

 

Na, because like you said before they can make the 3.5" just as dense and then it will have an even larger advantage, and while it may take more power to run the 3.5" do you think its alot of power? When video cards and things are eating up 400w of power on there own, I doubt anybody will cry over 1w more power for there HDD and when its reading the outer edge of the platter it gets so much more data that it doesn't have to spin as many times to get it.

SSD I do think is the future of laptops but not for a long while yet, well business class I see it happening soon as they want max performance, less heat, better battery ect. but for a multimedia/gamer we need alot of space and SSD wont offer that for a long while I think, especially not at a decent price.

If you really want to know the future of desktop storage, I bet it will be something totally new not based on current HDD tech at all, already there have been a few different successful changes in technology like that 3d drive thing that had 30tb of storage or something, they just needed to tweak its random access ability and a few other things.

I am just not sold on the idea, but I am always open for new things and lets see how it does when its out (and how much it costs.... if its like 100$ more than the same performance 3.5" drive thats like 3 years of power difference between the two probably and thus makes the cheaper power issue void)

 

Went thru about half of those benchmarks.... and if they are correct this is what to get:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218

WD's 640gb HDD it looks like it actually beat the new raptor in most test and its going for a whole 109$

So you have 2x the storage space (640 vs 300) for 1/3 the price (apx 100 vs 300) so that makes it 6x more efficant in a price vs performance aspect.

The 2.5" format is about unless since it is used in a 3.5" formfactor cooler and the review you posted stated that its about 2x taller than a regular notebook drive so you have about no chance to fit it in a laptop.

I feel good since I have been sticking with high density high capacity WD drives since I started building computers, so that review backs up that I have been making a good choice.

 

wow that 640 GB drive is only $109... yeah definitely a better deal.

 

Haha yeah so much so that I just ordered one. 20$ off and I am out of space constantly on my desktop my wife will be happy that we can download movies again.

I want to find a chart like this thats larger, I am intrested in seeing if any of the 750gb or 1tb WD models have comparible platter size & performance because usually the larger the drive the better the deal. 1tb is an exception, I found it was cheaper to get 2x 500gb drives but the 750's fall in a good place.

Still the 640gb and great performance for 109 & free ship I wont cry over it.

 

Some folks posting here need a serious tech update!

The reason every new high end drive is using 2.5" drive platters is platter stability and WD was very wise to follow! Problem with high RPM drives is that, while a larger drive platter does give you a higher maximum transfer rate it also hinders seek times (more surface to cover by the head) and has more (heat related) wrappage causing incorrect reads.

Platter sizes for the Seagate Cheetah and Maxtor Atlas 3.5" drives allready were 65mm and 70mm for the 15k RPM Fujitsu's for quite some time.

About the SATA vs SAS story, check this page out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-SATA-VelociRaptor,1914-9.html

Not bad for SATA... True, there is more to SAS than bandwith, but those advantages don't do much for workstation performance.

Current high performance 2.5" drives have lower max transfer rate, but also lower seek times (with is the current reason for needing 15.000 RPM drives):
http://www.storagereview.com/ST973451SS.sr?page=0,1

 

WD can make a server version of this drive that lets people cram a whole bunch of drives into a properly cooled RAID chassis without the 3.5" adapter. Watch someone rig up a mounting bracket with a bunch of these drives taking up two or three 5.25" slots with a 120mm fan parked in front of them.

I wouldn't mind replacing my 150GB Raptor with one of these.

 

Same here, and that being said, I wouldn't mind 6 of those in a 1U formfactor chassis (currently done with 2.5" SAS drives) for a general purpose workhorse VMWare server. Another thing would be portable (suitcase) workstations, I've been toying around with that idea for some time.

 

Good info and benchmarks links.

I think the main advantage of this 2.5" drive is its seek time.

 

Can someone tell me why this harddrive cannot work in a laptop?
My laptop has a modified harddrive bay, which can easily fit two 15mm thick harddrives. I have two sata connectors in my Voodoo.
My modified fan bay is cooled by a 17.1cfm EBM Papst industrial grade fan. This fan has no problems cooling my two 7k100's which I had in my laptop before I went to the 7k200's. The harddrive temperature never ran above 120Fahrenheit with the 7k100's.

People say that the drive will not work because of its need of a 12v line.
I looked up the sata pinout, and every sata port has a 12volt line, even on laptops.

Here is the SATA pin out for the data part of the connector:

Pin # ) Signal Name / Signal Description
1) GND / Ground
2) A+ / Transmit +
3) A- / Transmit -
4) GND / Ground
5) B- / Receive -
6) B+ / Receive +
7) GND / Ground


Here is the SATA pin out for the power part of the connector:

Pin # ) Signal Name / Signal Description
1) V33 / 3.3v Power
2) V33 / 3.3v Power
3) V33 / 3.3v Power, Pre-charge, 2nd mate
4) Ground / 1st Mate
5) Ground / 2nd Mate
6) Ground / 3rd Mate
7) V5 / 5v Power, pre-charge, 2nd mate
8) V5 / 5v Power
9) V5 / 5v Power
10) Ground / 2nd Mate
11) Reserved / -
12) Ground / 1st Mate
13) V12 / 12v Power, Pre-charge, 2nd mate
14) V12 / 12v Power
15) V12 / 12v Power

The pinouts of the SATA port show that there are 12volt lines. I hope that somebody lucky enough to get their hands on this drive can test it in there notebook.
Then again, I think my notebook maybe the only one in the world which can fit one let alone two of these drives.

K-TRON

 

K-TRON,

Write a letter to WD and ask them to send you one for review and notebook tests. You never know, they might be interested.

 

Actually not a bad idea stewie! Couldn't hurt?