Western Digital announced Monday that it has begun shipping a VelociRaptor hard drive, an enterprise-class device the company said has twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase by its previous generation of hard drives.

Tom McDorman, WD vice president and general manager of its enterprise business unit, said the new drive “delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market.” He added that the drive was created to lead “PC enthusiasts into the next era” of storage performance and to satisfy their thirst for speed.

10,000 RPM

that 300GB monster spins at 10,000 rpm, has a three Gb/s interface and a 16MB cache, and is initially targeted at gamers and owners of professional workstations. There are expectations that it will be used in business settings as well, with a mean duration amoung failures rating of 1.4 million hours. WD said that spec was the highest available reliability rating of any

The SATA drive itself is squeezed into a 2.5-inch chassis, although it is enclosed in what WD calls the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a heat sink built-in. that arrangement allows the small unit to be mounted into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and to stay cool. At present, the drives are not compatible with notebook computers.

John Rydning, research manager for hard drives at IDC, said the VelociRaptor is primarily intended for the gaming market, although its reliability standards are closer to those of an enterprise. He described WD’s approach to the cooling issue in that style factor as being “clever and innovative.”

36 Hours of HD Video

To give some concept of how much storage is in that drive, WD offered some guideposts. The drive can store up to 85,700 digital photos in JPEG mode with an average size of six MB each, or…

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