New WD VelociRaptor 300GB On it,s way

[Oversized Rooster]

I certainly WILL buy this drive. However, I really don't understand why they had to make it in laptop form. What does this gain them or us?

[belgolas]

Its not bad but for the price you could buy 3 500 GB hard drives or 2 750 GB drives and put them in raid which would beat this.

[DK2]

Looks sweet!
Although its tempting, I don’t think I’ll get one,
but rather get 2 150G raptors instead and run them raid0.
Should be a little faster for the same price, and I only need 300G.
besides if I got 1 300G, I’d want 2 for a raid0
$600? no no no…

[Spaceman-Spiff]

Originally Posted by Oversized Rooster

I certainly WILL buy this drive. However, I really don't understand why they had to make it in laptop form. What does this gain them or us?

Although it's 2.5", it's thicker than normal laptop drives. It probably won't fit inside a laptop.

According to the reviews, what you gain from smaller plates is faster seek time, and less power consumption.

[Eagle Eye]

I bet they run pretty hot though the whole outter mounting system in theory is a heatsink, I'd still want a couple of fans blowing on them.

In regards to their size it doesn't take much these days to eat up 300GB considering the size of games, movies and applications the additional 300GB ensures that you will enough space over the longterm. I can speak from first hand experience I can tell you price was not a factor when I purchased 2 WD Raptor 36gb but size became a factor down the road, honestly people don't buy these drives with storage space in mind they buy for their speed. Its so that games load faster, applications install faster and your computer all around feels a little bit quicker. Even with my maxtor drives with all the fancy features sata2, NCQ and 16mb cache in raid 0 still don't equal the raw performance of a WD Raptor.

When looking at the evolution of harddrives they are lightyears behind where everything else in the computing world today, the only other thing i would consider is a SSD, but that itself is years away from being affordable, the write rates still need work and capacity is getting better but nothing compared to whats available.

[Thund3rball]

Sweet looking HDD with great performance. Doubt I will buy one though. Just not worth it to me.

[Tomvill]

Originally Posted by Eagle Eye

I bet they run pretty hot though the whole outter mounting system in theory is a heatsink, I'd still want a couple of fans blowing on them.

One of the reviews I read on this hard drive said they ran one heck of alot cooler than the raptor it replaces.. THe reviewer stated he was pleasantly suprised at the much lower temperatures.. W/D also will void the warranty if the drives are removed from the heatsink. It was also stated that western digital thought the drive was 90% optimised so we could see a little more performance out of these yet which would be a bonus.. Ill buy 2 as long as the retail version benchmarks are at least the same as what I saw..I've got a TB here already so all I need is the speed for my os and programs/ Games AND I'M then a happy camper.

[khelben1979]

When it comes to performance concerning the read transfer rate, it nearly doubles that of the one of my current Western Digital S-ATA at 500GB. So, for me it's certainly attractive, but the price is... well, too expensive for me anyway, especially since 300GB isn't very much in capacity.

How well would the new disk perform as a Windows swap? Any theories or real experiences of this, yet? The 150GB S-ATA disk sounds more attractive to me because of the price, hmm.. :) Although I won't get one for a while, though.

[Nodscene]

NCIX has them listed now for $329.99 (http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...20Digital%20WD). Not sure when they will actually ship though.

[Tomvill]

I,ve seen them for $295 at premier computers in ontario.. Your definately gonna pay a premium to be one of the first owners.. I,ll buy 2 but not till the new nethalem motherboards come out.. Hopefully they will have come down a bit by then.. God I wish another hard drive manufacturer would go after this market with a sata drive.. competition would be good :)