WD Ships New 600GB High-Performance HHDs

Western Digital, which wants to be known as WD, on April 5 started shipping the fastest, most capacious 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drive it has ever made.

At 600GB, the VelociRaptor VR200M doubles the capacity of the original version, which was released in 2008. A 450GB model is also available.

With a faster spindle speed of 10,000 rpm (most Serial ATA drives run at 5,400 rpm), the new drives are designed to replace slower, smaller drives for all kinds of machines, including gaming machines, high-performance blade servers, high-end PC workstations and Macintoshes, and standard rack servers.

They are too thick at 15 millimeters to fit into a standard laptop, however.

The new VelociRaptor features a 32MB cache and 200GB platter. Company benchmarks report an MTBF (mean time between failures) mark of 1.4 million hours, which is well above average.

As do most new HDDs, the new VelociRaptor machines run on the 6G-bps SATA standard, but these new drives are the only 10,000 rpm drives now in the market that support that I/O standard, WD claimed.

WD is setting the suggested retail prices for the 600GB at $329 and the 450GB at $299.