Western Digital added a fresh drive to its performance desktop line up today, in the guise of the Velociraptor. It represents a significant update to the original WD Raptor drives and finally adds a SATA 3Gb/s interface to go with the familiar 10K RPM spindle speed and 16MB cache. In appearance it is actually quite different to previous Raptor branded drives and is in fact a 2.5" drive with a large heatsink monikered the 'IcePack', which takes it up to 3.5" dimensions. The good part about these changes is that seek times are down (and they were already quite snappy) to 4.2ms (read) and 4.7ms (write). Sustained data rates should also see a healthy improvement as well as drive reliability, which is now quoted at 1.4 million hours MTBF (mean time between failures). The drives are going into Alienware ALX systems to start with, but should be available in retail channels by mid May. Expect to pay $299.99 when they do become available. As you can see from today's hardware roundup, HotHardware have a review of the drive should you want to check out how things stack up.
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