Final fling for mechanical drives

Western Digital ups Velociraptor capacity.

Western Digital has, in what some may conjecture is the final roll of the dice for traditional hard drives, launched two larger models in its Velociraptor line.

These models offer 450GB and 600GB capacities thanks to increased areal density of 200GB per platter. Because these are Velociraptor drives, those platters spin at 10,000RPM which, shockingly, after a decade still remains the highest rotational speed in ATA drives. WD decided it was time to support the 6Gbps SATA3 standard and will produce both drives with 32MB cache.

Western Digital has been slow in adopting solid state drive (SSD) technology, having just announced its first WD branded unit in March. Although Velociraptors provide attractive cost per gigabyte compared to SSDs, they can't match SSDs for I/Os per second or data transfer rate performance. However, mechanical hard drives don't suffer from electronic wear like SSDs, so they still offer longer life and better reliability, particularly in write-intensive applications.

The consumer orientated Velociraptors still come with the ridiculous Icepak heatsink, which as most tests show is merely there to boost the ego of those who have spent the best part of $US330 for drive whose sequential data transfer rates are almost matched by other models in the firm's own range which have double the areal density. For 'enterprise' customers looking for Serial Attached SCSI level performance on the cheap will, unsurprisingly, be disappointed, but there is a version of the drive without the grandiose heatsink that's suitable for high density rackmount servers.

With SSDs falling in price and the latest trend being to put out low capacity and relatively affordable SSDs as 'OS drives', justifying the considerable outlay on a Velociraptor is becoming harder for the average user who doesn't need to support a large, high activity database system. With SAS drives also becoming more affordable, these latest editions of the Velociraptor might just be the last as the firm finally takes its head out of the sand and embraces SSDs.