WD VelociRaptor Drives Shrink to 2.5 Inches

By Nick Mokey Published July 22, 2008

WD VelociRaptor Drives Shrink to 2.5 Inches — Image used with permission by copyright holder

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.

Recommended Videos

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.

Former Editor in Chief

As Digital Trends’ Editor in Chief, Nick Mokey oversees an editorial team covering every gadget under the sun, along with…

Computing

A Windows 11 bug may be quietly eating hundreds of gigabytes of your storage

Windows 11’s storage-eating bug now has a fix from Microsoft

Windows 11 suffering from RAM crisis

If your Windows 11 PC suddenly looks low on storage, your downloads folder or game library may not be the problem. According to Windows Latest, a bug tied to a Windows system file can silently consume tens or even hundreds of gigabytes on the system drive.

The file in question is called CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal, and it sits inside Windows’ Capability Access Manager folder. Windows Latest says the issue may appear as unusually high “System files” usage in Windows 11’s storage breakdown, even though the Settings app does not clearly identify the exact file responsible. In some reported cases, users saw it grow to 200GB, and even more.

Computing

Your next Teams meeting could have an AI teammate that answers questions for you

Teams is getting smarter, cleaner, and quieter about it. The AI features are opt-in, the chat cleanup is automatic.

Computer, Electronics, Laptop

Microsoft Teams is getting a meaningful update that overhauls almost every part of how you use the app, from AI-assisted meetings to a cleaner chat layout. Most of the changes are already in testing, and several are scheduled to roll out before the end of the summer.

Starting with the most interesting addition: an upgraded AI Facilitator that can listen to your meeting, spot when someone seems confused, and generate a response (via Windows Report).

Computing

A hacker’s arrest just revealed how Microsoft can track your Windows device

Microsoft knew what websites his Windows PC visited.

Windows 11 on a laptop

A teenager allegedly used a VPN to cover his tracks while hacking a US jewelry retailer, but Microsoft knew anyway.

Court documents unsealed in the US case against Peter Stokes, a 19-year-old dual US-Estonian citizen accused of being a member of the notorious Scattered Spider hacking group, reveal that Microsoft provided the FBI with records tied to a tracking mechanism called the Global Device Identifier, or GDID.