WD VelociRaptor Drives Shrink to 2.5 Inches

By ditching the giant heatsinks that originally enlarged the drives to 3.5 inches, the next VelociRaptor reaches the enterprise-friendly 2.5-inch form factor.

Western Digital’s venerable VelociRaptor drives just made the leap from speedy toys for gamers to serious business-class storage. The company announced the newest version of the ultra-fast drives on Wednesday, which has been specifically tailored for use in blade servers and other mission-critical applications with a 2.5-inch form factor and the industry’s highest ever reliability rating for a SATA drive.

Like the earlier version announced in April, the enterprise-level VelicRaptor screams along at 10,000 RPM, sports a 3GB/s SATA 3 interface, and offers capacity of up to 300GB. However, unlike that more pedestrian desktop predecessor, the latest VelociRaptor sheds the bulky “IcePack” hard drive cooler that bumped drive size to 3.5 inches, and now slides into a 2.5-inch bay without issues.

Besides a reliability rating of 1.4 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF), the drive consumes approximately 35 percent less electricity than Western Digital’s original Raptor series, making it ideal for building banks of drives where the slightest power savings will be multiplied many times and a single failure can be catastrophic.

The enterprise-level VelociRaptor will be available to OEM distributors by the end of the month. In the mean time, consumers can still pick up the bulkier 3.5-inch versions through Western Digital for $299.