Western Digital WD VelociRaptor

The company plans to market the drive to gamers and PC enthusiasts first, but the VelociRaptor is suitable for enterprise-class applications, too. The drive's rating for mean time between failure is 1.2 million hours, which puts it on a par with enterprise-grade drives.

Installing the drive was easy; but as soon as you take the drive out of the box, you'll notice that the VelociRaptor is no ordinary hard drive. Western Digital squeezed it into a 2.5-inch chassis; traditionally, desktop hard drives--whether 7200-rpm or 10,000-rpm models--are 3.5 inches long. (Though the drive itself measures only 2.5 inches, the VelociRaptor is designed to fit in a 3.5-inch drive bay.)

WD says that it chose the 2.5-inch form for a couple of reasons. First, from a mechanical standpoint, maximum flutter occurs at the outer edges of a spinning hard disk; but advances in areal density, even in smaller 2.5-inch disk platter designs, meant that WD could reduce the area, and still have double the areal density of the two-year-old 150GB Raptor drive.

Second, the company devised a new way to manage heat generation, which remains a major concern with hard drives, particularly 10,000-rpm models. Western Digital tackles the issue head-on by mounting the 2.5-inch VelociRaptor drive into a heat sink sled. The IcePack heat sink helps the VelociRaptor run cooler than the previous-generation Raptor; WD says that the Ice Pack reduces the temperature by about 5 degrees. And because the sled doubles as the VelociRaptor's mounting adapter, the 2.5-inch drive fits smoothly into a 3.5-inch drive bay.

The VelociRaptor WD3000GLFS shipped in RAID 0 configuration on the high-performance Alienware Area-51 ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. The $300 drive subsequently entered mass distribution at Western Digital's Web site and at selected resellers.