Western Digital Adds VelociRaptor Drives

By Nick Mokey Published April 20, 2008

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 It’s also shrunken to a 2.5-inch form factor from 3.5-inches, but the space savings have been replaced by Western Digital’s IcePack passive hard drive heat sink, which soaks the extra space (and heat), making the new drives fit standard 3.5-inch mounting brackets.

Recommended Videos

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.

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.