For many users in the market it seemed as though the high performance HDD was finally at the end of its life. With the advent of SSD’s the lowly HDD became dedicated to merely a storage drive.

Western Digital however has made good the rumor we heard a few months back in regards to their VelociRaptor Lineup. We will be seeing a new generation of these tried and true Hard Drives in the coming months.

Still based upon a conventional platform the VelociRaptor does get a few good tweaks and upgrades in its newest form. SATA 6GB/s interface will be supported as well as an onboard 32MB cache, spindle speeds will remain the same at 10,000 rpm. Giving this drive a sustained read speed of 145mb/s as well as a nominal access time of 3 ms.

The Drive itself is a 2.5″ unit encased in a larger 3.5″ enclosure/heatsink that comes complete with Aluminum ridges for added heat dissipation. With Areal Density doubled as well we can expect to see the Raptor come in capacities of 150 GB, 300 GB, 450 GB and 600 GB variants. This should really give the end user a better price-per-gigabyte ratio.

Availability is not yet known on these but pricing should be competitive considering the vast amount of SSD’s available on the Market today.