Need to Know Blog

The World’s Fastest SATA Hard Disk: Meet WD’s VelociRaptor

This is not really "latest news" right now, since the drive came out about a month ago, but it’s definitely something you Need to Know if you are going to be buying any hard drives soon.

Western Digital has finally "retired" their Raptor hard drive by introducing the new VelociRaptor, a 35% faster, 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive. This monster packs a 3Gb/s interface, 16MB of cache, 300GB max capacity, and a cool new look. What’s even more amazing is that it’s actually a 2.5" hard drive, but the IcePack-dubbed cooler it has around it makes it fit into a 3.5" slot
I just wish I haven’t bought the 150GB Raptor just about 2 months ago

The drive is, as expected, freakishly fast (most likely faster than the prehistoric animal whose name it bears), with sustainable transfer speeds of about 125MB / second, acceptable operating temperature and noise levels.

If you need performance you know what to get. It can easily par with the SSD drives at a fraction of their cost. If you’re really into performance needs, get 2 while you’re at it and set them in RAID mode. I bet you will not need to get any other drive for years to come

Thanks: Engadget

Read — Tom’s Hardware
Read — MaximumPC
Read — PCPer
Read — HotHardware
Read — The Tech Report

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Wish you had an SSD Hard Drive but don’t have the dough?

Yeah, me too! Now, though, we have another option than spending $1000 bucks for this; meet the Sans Digital’s CS1T and CR2T devices which turn CF (Compact Flash) cards, into 2.5" HDD enclosures perfect for your laptop.

CS1T is single-card enclosure, while it’s brother CR2T is a dual card enclosure that uses RAID and supports capacity of up to 64GB.

The benefits are same as having an SSD drive: less power consumption, less heat, shock prevention, and silent operation.

Supports RAID 1 (Mirroring) or Spanning, up to 2 x 32GB CF cards, and it connects via SATA.

You can buy it now for $99, no CF’s included of course. Considering CF card prices of about $160GB per 32GB card, it definitely beats the SSD price. I wish there were some benchmarks to show the true speed so we can really conclude on how it compares with true SSD drives.

Buy it @ Sans Digital Store
Thanks: Engadget

Update: Engadget has a video of a similar model from Century together with a video you might be interested in: http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/22/video-centurys-compact-flash-ssd-sata-adapter-reviewed/

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Posted in CF, HDD, SATA, SSD | No Comments »