At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

[pentium]

Info on the drive.

Okay, so it is a a 10K rpm drive and so far the benchmark results have shown that the additional 2.5K rpm has sped reading and writing up but in all honesty I would be too scared to use the thing.



With more than six years of searching the internet and two boxes of hard drives stored in my basement I have never seen a drive that is so small yet requires such a massive heatsink (and if you narrow down the field to drives used in PC's and not proprietary systems, any kind of heatsink at all).
Ventilation would be a must and if someone had these in a RAID configuration, well there better be at least two fans on that drive cage.

Other than that it seems like a good drive though with it's $300+ pricetag for just 300Gb of space I could not see myself getting one any time soon.

[kikkoman]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

look at the specs... it only draws ~6W which is less than what most 3.5" disks need.
2.5" disks run cooler anyway, so it's not gonna get MUCH hotter than a conventional 7.200rpm hdd with those fins I suppose.
if there's a moderate airflow, a massive aluminium block would probably work, too.
if the case design is crap however, even these fins won't help much. good they have a 5-year warranty.

not that i wouldn't trust it (WD is still on my personal "good" list) but you get TWO samsung HD103UJ (1TB, 32MB cache, yeah) for the same money.

[willawake]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

looks like a SAS 2.5" with a sata connection instead, in a 3.5" frame

SAS 2.5" are already with many installations in enterprise rackmount servers
first time i saw them i thought if it is so small how can it be reliable.

[gonzo0815]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

I would love to have this drive in an c2d laptop would make a really good desktop replacement.
I hate expensive laptops with 5400rpm hdd`s only to get the runtime on the paper longer.

[willawake]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

yes it would be a dual purpose machine. notebook and sandwich toaster

[Fatal0E]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

I also thought about my laptop! But its to tall damnit!

[zandrax]

Re: At first Glance: The new WD VelociRaptor

Pentium, the heatsink is so big because it adapts a 2.5" drive into a 3.5" slot. It has too few fins to be able to cool a very heating drive, so the drive itself doesn't heat much or WD made a wrong heatsink. Only time can reply.
I think high speed drives aren't really a bargain: too expensive as disk drives and not many advantages over SSDs: Raptor strong point is its reduced latency wen compared to normal hard disks, but it's still higher that flash based devices (4 ms vs typical 0.1 ms).
Just my 2 cents.

Zandrax