Western Digital holds the speed crown when it comes to hard drives with its 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive. The drive was originally aimed at the performance consumer PC market when it launched and today the company announced a new version of the VelociRaptor that is aimed at enterprise usage.
Western Digital says that the enterprise VelociRaptor uses an enterprise-class 2.5-inch form factor for blade and 1U/2U servers in a rack. The drive has a 300GB storage capacity and consumes 35% less power than previous Raptor hard drives.
The enterprise VelociRaptor is designed to enterprise standards for reliability in demanding computing environments. The SATA VelociRaptor has the highest mean time between failure rating of any SATA drive on the market at 1.4 million hours according to Western Digital.
Despite the smaller 2.5-inch form factor, the enterprise VelociRaptor maintains the 10,000 RPM speed, SATA 3 GB/s interface and 16MB cache found on the consumer version. You may recall when DailyTech first reported on the VelociRaptor for the 3.5-inch enthusiast market the drive itself was actually only a 2.5-inch inside a larger cooling block to make the drive fit in standard 3.5-inch slots in a PC chassis. Western Digital says the enterprise version of the drive is currently undergoing evaluation with OEM customers and will be available via select retailers at the end of the month. Pricing information was not offered, but considering it is the same drive as the 3.5-inch with the heatsink missing it would be reasonable to expect it to come in at the same $299.99 price point or even a bit under that mark.
Source: DailyTech