Western Digital Adds VelociRaptor Drives

The latest hard drives to tout the high-end Raptor name get a 3.0 Gbit/s SATA interface and supposedly outperform their older brothers by 35 percent.

Western Digital took its Raptor line of high-performance hard drives a step further on Monday with the introduction of the VelociRaptor. The company claims its newest SATA drive performs up to 35 percent faster than the last generation.

Like the original Raptor, the VelociRaptor is a 10,000 RPM drive with a 16MB cache, but it now offers 300GB of storage in a single drive, rather than the 150GB the Raptor topped out at. It’s also shrunken to a 2.5-inch form factor from 3.5-inches, but the space savings have been replaced by Western Digital’s IcePack passive hard drive heat sink, which soaks the extra space (and heat), making the new drives fit standard 3.5-inch mounting brackets.

The VelociRaptor also sports a speedier 3.0 Gbit/s SATA interface, which is twice as fast as the Raptor’s 1.5 Gbit/s interface. Western Digital also claims the new drives boasts the best reliability rating of any SATA drive on the market:  1.4 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF).

VelociRaptor drives will first appear in Alienware’s ALX machines at the end of April. Users will have the option of adding dual 300GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration. The drives will crop up at Western Digital’s online store and at retailers later on, in mid May, for $299.99.